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A WORLD IN FERMENT 

INTERPRETATIONS OE THE WAR 
FOR A NEW WORLD 



A WORLD IN FERMENT 

INTERPRETATIONS OF THE WAR 
FOR A NEW WORLD 



BY 

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 

PRESIDENT OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1917 



J\52l 

■2 



Copyright, 1917, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published August, 1917 



Copyright, 1914, 1915, by THE NEW YORK TIMES CO. 



AUG 16 1917 




\15 



©CU 4 73 139 
"He. /. 



TO THOSE MEN AND WOMEN OF WHATEVER 
LAND WHO PRIZE INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY, WHO 
DISTINGUISH TRUE DEMOCRACY FROM FALSE, 
AND WHO WISH TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHICH IS 
AT PEACE BECAUSE IT IS BOTH FREE AND JUST 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



I Introduction i 

II The Onrush of War n 

III The United States of Europe . . 25 

IV The United States as a World 

Power 47 

V Patriotism 67 

VI The Changed Outlook 85 

VII Higher Preparedness 101 

VIII The Building of the Nation ... 115 

IX Nationality and Beyond 131 

X The Present Crisis 143 

XI Is America Drifting? 151 

XII Looking Forward 171 

XIII The Russian Revolution 205 

vii 



viii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

XIV The Call to Service 219 

XV The Envoys at the University . . 227 

XVI The International Mind: How to 

Develop It 233 

XVII A World in Ferment 243 

Index 251 



I 

INTRODUCTION 



INTRODUCTION 

Since August I, 1914, no American has been 
quite free to speak in public on the issues and 
the consequences of the war without bearing 
constantly in mind the attitude of the Govern- 
ment of the United States. That attitude, 
which began as neutrality and which on April 
6, 1917 passed over into participation in the 
conflict, has in its various stages of develop- 
ment probably marked with substantial cor- 
rectness the state of American public opinion 
in relation to the war. When one looks back, 
however, from participation to neutrality, he 
cannot help seeing how imperfectly, even from 
the very beginning, neutrality reflected the 
actual relations of the war to the present and 
the future of the people of the United States. 
Nevertheless, it takes time and events of a 
compelling character to affect the controlling 
opinion of a nation of more than one hundred 
millions whose traditions are of detachment 
from world politics in general and from Euro- 
pean controversies in particular. It seems 
quite certain that the future historian will 

3 



4 INTRODUCTION 

dwell with more emphasis upon the complete 
transformation which the war has effected in 
the feelings and policies of the people of the 
United States than upon the fact that it took 
nearly three years to effect that transformation. 
It may well be that the war would have been 
differently conducted and more quickly ended 
had the Government of the United States an- 
nounced immediately on the first declaration 
of war that, as a co-signatory of the Hague 
Conventions, it would deem it a duty to pro- 
test against the violation by any belligerent 
of the Hague Conventions, of the laws and cus- 
toms of civilized warfare, or of the rules of 
international law. Such a declaration would 
not have prevented the invasion of Belgium; 
that had been planned too long and was too 
essential a part of the contemplated attack to 
be so easily checked. But it might well have 
prevented some of the shocking outrages that 
followed in Belgium, in northern France, in 
Poland, in Serbia, and in Roumania, as well as 
have held in leash the dogs of submarine war- 
fare. Whether this be true or not, such a 
declaration would have marked an epoch in 
the history of nations, for it would have pointed 



INTRODUCTION 5 

with the utmost energy and directness to law 
at a time when resort to force was being had 
on a scale hitherto unheard of in history. 

As the war has proceeded, it has become so 
plain that even he who runs may read, that it 
is essentially a war for a new world. It is a 
war for a new international world, and a war 
for a new intranational world. 

It requires no great gift of prophecy to fore- 
see that the new international world that will 
almost certainly arise upon the ruins of this war 
will be one in which the nations of the earth 
will band themselves together more closely than 
ever before, not to enforce peace but to se- 
cure peace. The dreams of seers and the long- 
cherished projects of statesmen are likely soon 
to be fulfilled in many of their essential parts. 
This appears to be a safe prediction, for the 
reason that there seems to be no other way in 
which human foresight and human capacity 
can make highly improbable the recurrence of 
any such holocaust as is now consuming civili- 
zation. Some suggestions as to ways and means 
by which this new international world may be 
achieved and established are offered in the 
pages that follow. 



6 INTRODUCTION 

The war is also a war for a new intranational 
world. The political developments in Great 
Britain, in France, and in the United States, 
to say nothing of the stupendous revolution in 
Russia, indicate the character of this new world. 
It will be a world in which democracy will be 
more secure, more effective, more just and 
better established. It is to be hoped that it 
will be a world in which there will be a larger 
measure of co-operation between government 
and private enterprise than has heretofore been 
usual, but in which government will not stifle 
and suppress private enterprise with its clumsy 
and costly hand. It will not be a world from 
which vagaries and vice can be excluded, be- 
cause vagaries and vice accompany humanity 
on its progress; but there is every reason to 
believe that it will be a world purified and 
strengthened by the tremendous trials to which 
the world of to-day is being subjected. 

The new world will be one in which inter- 
national policies will play a greatly increased 
part. Perhaps the greatest enemy of true inter- 
nationalism is false internationalism. Move- 
ments to advance international interdependence 
and international understanding are of two 



INTRODUCTION 7 

distinct kinds. One of these is both mislead- 
ing and harmful, and by its methods and proc- 
esses would make the achievement of its de- 
clared aim quite impossible. The other is wise 
and statesmanlike, and follows the path by 
which such progress as has already been made 
has been achieved. Of these two methods of 
promoting what may be called internationalism 
the former would proceed by denouncing all 
nationalistic and patriotic feeling whatsoever 
in order to exalt the supernational brotherhood 
of man, and to lay stress upon a world-wide 
community without national ties or national 
ambitions. To use a figure drawn from chem- 
istry, this might be called colloidal internation- 
alism. It is hopelessly impractical as an ideal, 
and hopelessly unsound and unstable as a 
public policy, whether for individuals or for 
nations. The second method of promoting 
internationalism would strengthen and develop 
nationalistic and patriotic sentiments and aims, 
in order that when so strengthened they may 
be used without impairment or weakening as 
elements in a larger human undertaking of 
which each nation should be an independent 
and integral part. Pursuing the same figure, 



8 INTRODUCTION 

this might be called crystalline international- 
ism. The strength and beauty of the whole 
international structure when complete would 
then depend upon and reflect the strength and 
beauty of each of its national elements. The 
colloidal internationalism of the type of per- 
son who insists that he knows no country but 
humanity, and that he is a citizen of no state 
but only of the world, is hopeless nonsense. It 
prevents the development of true internation- 
alism by affronting common sense. 

It is hoped that the new world will also 
come to an understanding with itself about 
peace. It will perhaps understand, what some 
excellent persons are not now able to see, that 
peace is not an ideal at all; it is a state atten- 
dant upon the achievement of an ideal. The 
ideal itself is human liberty, justice, and the 
honorable conduct of an orderly and humane 
society. Given this, a durable peace follows 
naturally as a matter of course. Without this, 
there is no peace, but only a rule of force until 
liberty and justice revolt against it in search 
of peace. It is Tacitus who records the British 
chieftain Calgacus as saying of the invading 
Romans of his day, Solitudinem faciunt, pacem 



INTRODUCTION g 

appellant. If Imperium be read for Solitudi- 
nem, this pregnant sentence is a true description 
of the political philosophy and the military 
policy of the twentieth century Teutons. 

To regard peace as an end in itself and as 
something to be achieved at all hazards, is in 
effect to labor for the indefinite continuance 
of war. The new world of which we are in 
search will insist upon justice, liberty, and 
righteousness, as its foundation, and it will 
welcome durable peace as their accustomed 
companion and friend. 

Nicholas Murray Butler. 

Columbia University 

In the City of New York 

July 14, 1917 



II 

THE ONRUSH OF WAR 



An Address at the Opening of the 161st Academic Year 
of Columbia University, September 23, 1914 



THE ONRUSH OF WAR 

Our usual interests however great, our usual 
problems however pressing, all seem petty and 
insignificant in view of what has befallen the 
world while we were seeking rest and refresh- 
ment in the summer holiday. The murky 
clouds of cruel, relentless war, lit by the light- 
ning flash of great guns and made more terrible 
by the thunderous booming of cannon, hang 
over the European countries that we know and 
love so well. The great scholars that we would 
have so gladly welcomed here, have not come 
to us. They are killing and being killed across 
the sea. Friends and colleagues whom we 
honor are filled with hate toward each other, 
and toward each other's countrymen. The 
words that oftenest come to our lips, the ideals 
that we cherish and pursue, the progress that 
we fancied we were making, seem not to exist. 
Mankind is back in the primeval forest, with 
the elemental brute passions finding a truly 
fiendish expression. The only apparent use of 
science is to enable men to kill other men more 

13 



i 4 THE ONRUSH OF WAR 

quickly and in greater numbers. The only 
apparent service of philosophy is to make the 
worse appear the better reason. The only ap- 
parent evidence of the existence of religion is 
the fact that divergent and impious appeals to 
a palpably pagan God, have led him, in per- 
plexed distress, to turn over the affairs of 
Europe to an active and singularly accom- 
plished devil. 

What are we to think ? Is science a sham ? 
Is philosophy a pretense ? Is religion a mere 
rumor ? Is the great international structure of 
friendship, good will, and scholarly co-operation 
upon which this University and many of its 
members have worked so long, so faithfully, 
and apparently with so much success, only an 
illusion ? Are the long and devoted labors of 
scholars and of statesmen to enthrone Justice 
in the place of Brute Force in the world, all 
without effect ? Are Lowell's lines true — 

" Right forever on the scaffold, 
Wrong forever on the throne"? 

The answer is No; a thousand times, No ! 

Despite all appearances, even in this wicked 
and unprovoked assault on the liberties of 



THE ONRUSH OF WAR 15 

peace-loving men and nations which is decimat- 
ing the flower of European manhood, multiply- 
ing by the million the widows, the orphans, the 
suffering, and the distressed, wrecking the com- 
mercial and industrial progress of a century, 
impoverishing alike the belligerents and the 
neutrals, closing the exchanges from New York 
to Buenos Aires, ruining the cotton-planter of 
the South as well as the copper-miner of the 
Far West, loosing in the frenzied combatants 
the primitive instincts of savagery and lust — 
even here there is to be found something on 
which this University may continue to build 
the temple of wisdom, of justice, and of true 
civilization to which its hand was laid when 
George II was king, when Louis XV still reigned 
in France, and when Frederick the Great was 
at the height of his fame in Prussia. 

We are a neutral nation, and the President 
has enjoined us all to observe neutrality in 
speech and in deed; but neutrality is not indif- 
ference. Ours is not the neutrality of the 
casual passer-by who views with amused care- 
lessness a fight between two street rowdies; it is 
the neutrality of the just judge who aims, with- 
out passion and without prejudice, to render 



16 THE ONRUSH OF WAR 

judgment on the proved facts. We cannot if 
we would refrain from passing judgment upon 
the conduct of men, whether singly or in na- 
tions, and we should not attempt to do so. 

In the first place, the moral judgment of the 
American people as to the aggressors in this 
war and as to the several steps in the declara- 
tion and conduct of it, is clear, calm, and prac- 
tically unanimous. There is no beating of 
drums and blowing of bugles, but rather a sad 
pain and grief that our kin across the sea, owing 
whatever allegiance and speaking whatever 
tongue, have been led to engage in public mur- 
der and destruction on the most stupendous 
scale recorded in history. This of itself proves 
that the education of public opinion has pro- 
ceeded far, and, whatever he who extols war 
for its own sake may say, it shows that the 
heart of the American people is sound and its 
head well-informed. The attitude of the 
American press is worthy of the highest praise; 
in some notable instances the very high-water 
mark of dignity and of power has been reached. 
When the war-clouds have lifted, I believe 
that the moral judgment of the American peo- 
ple as to the responsibility for this war will 



. 



THE ONRUSH OF WAR 17 

prove to be that of the sober-minded and fair- 
minded men in every country of Europe. 

Next, it must not be forgotten that this war 
was made primarily by kings and by cabinets; 
it was not decreed by peoples. We can all tes- 
tify that the statement that kings and cabinets 
were forced into the war by public sentiment is 
absolutely untrue so far at least as several of 
the belligerent nations are concerned. Cer- 
tainly in not more than two cases were the 
chosen representatives of the people consulted 
at all. A tiny minority in each of several coun- 
tries whose conduct was hostile and provoked 
hostilities may have desired war, but the mili- 
tarist spirit was singularly lacking among the 
masses of the population in Germany, in Aus- 
tria-Hungary, and in Russia. There the people 
generally have simply accepted with grim resig- 
nation and reluctant enthusiasm the conflict 
which in each case they are taught to believe 
has been forced on them by another's aggression. 

The most significant statement that I heard 
in Europe was made to me on the third day of 
August last by a German-speaking railway ser- 
vant, a grizzled veteran of the Franco-Prussian 
War. In reply to my question as to whether 



18 THE ONRUSH OF WAR 

he would have to go to the front, the old man 
said: "No; I am too old. I am seventy-two. 
But my four boys went yesterday, God help 
them ! and I hate to have them go. For, 
sir," he added in a lowered voice, "this is not 
a peopled war; it is a kings' war, and when it 
is over there may not be so many kings." 

Again, a final end has now been put to the 
contention, always made with more emphasis 
than reasonableness, that huge armaments 
are themselves an insurance against war and 
an aid in maintaining peace. This argument 
was invented by those who really believe in 
war and in armaments as ends in themselves. 
Sundry politicians, many newspapers, and not 
a few good people who are proud to have their 
thinking done for them, accepted this dictum 
as a profound political truth. Its falsity is 
now plain to every one. Guns and bullets and 
armor are not made to take the place of postage 
stamps and books and laboratories and other 
instruments of civilization and of peace; they 
are made to kill people. Their only other pos- 
sible use is to excite terror, and terror, national 
or international, is not a safe foundation on 
which to attempt to build a civilization. 






THE ONRUSH OF WAR 19 

It seems pretty clear that when the present 
huge supplies of guns and ammunition are used 
up in the contest now going on, no civilized 
people will ever again permit its government to 
enter into a competitive armament race. The 
time may not be so very far distant when to be 
the first moral power in the world will be a 
considerably greater distinction than to be the 
first military power or the first naval power, 
and when the several nations will band them- 
selves together to repress the rule of force and 
to advance the rule of law. How any one, not 
a fit subject for a madhouse, can find in the 
awful events now happening in Europe a rea- 
son for asking the United States to desist 
from its attempts to promote a new interna- 
tional order in the world, is to me wholly in- 
conceivable. 

Another great gain is to be found in the fact 
that no one is willing to be responsible for this 
war. Every combatant alleges that he is on 
the defensive, and summons his fellow country- 
men who are scientists and philosophers to find 
some way to prove it. The old claim that war 
was a part of the moral order, a God-given in- 
strument for the spreading of enlightenment, 



20 THE ONRUSH OF WAR 

and the only real training-school for the manly 
virtues, is just now in a state of eclipse. Each 
one of the several belligerent nations insists 
that it — and its government — are devoted 
friends of peace, and that it is at war only be- 
cause war was forced upon it by the acts of 
some one else. As to who that some one else 
is, it has not yet been possible to get a unani- 
mous agreement. What we do know is that 
no one steps forward to claim credit for the 
war or to ask a vote of thanks or a decoration 
for having forced it upon Europe and upon the 
world. Everybody concerned is ashamed of it 
and apologetic for it. 

It may well be, moreover, that the desper- 
ately practical and direct education which this 
war is already affording will hasten very much 
the coming of the day when the close economic 
and intellectual interdependence of the nations 
will assert itself more emphatically and more 
successfully against national chauvinism and 
the preposterous tyranny of those who worship 
at the shrine of militarism. The armed peace 
which preceded this war and led directly to it, 
was in some respects worse than war itself; for 
it had many of the evils of war without war's 



THE ONRUSH OF WAR 21 

educational advantages. We are not likely to 
return again to that form of wickedness and 
folly, unless perchance the continent of Europe 
is able to produce another generation of public 
men as self-centred and of as narrow a vision 
as those who have generally been in control of 
public policy there for forty years past. The 
whole card-house of alliances and ententes, to- 
gether with the balance of power theory, has 
come tumbling heavily to the ground. Some- 
thing far different and much more rational will 
arise in its stead. In the Europe of to-morrow 
there will be no place for secret treaties and 
understandings, for huge systems of armed 
camps and limitless navies, for wide-spread in- 
ternational enmity and treachery, for carefully 
stimulated race and religious hatred, or for wars 
made on the sole responsibility of monarchs 
and of ministers. Moral, social, and political 
progress will refuse longer to pay the crushing 
tolls which a conventional diplomacy and an 
unenlightened statesmanship have demanded 
of them. It is not the Slav or the Teuton, the 
Latin or the Briton, the Oriental or the Ameri- 
can, who is the enemy of civilization and of 
culture. Militarism, there is the enemy! 



22 THE ONRUSH OF WAR 

The first notable victim of the Great War 
was the eloquent and accomplished French 
parliamentarian, M. Jaures. He was murdered 
by a war-crazed fanatic. In the course of a 
long and intimate conversation with M. Jaures 
shortly before his tragic death, he dwelt much 
on the part that America could play in binding 
the nations of Europe together. He spoke of 
the success of the policies that had been worked 
out here to make the United States and Ger- 
many and the United States and France better 
known to each other, and he thought that 
through the agency of the United States it 
might eventually be practicable to draw Ger- 
many and France together in real trust and 
friendship. As we parted, his last words to me 
were: "Do not leave off trying. No matter 
what the difficulties are, do not leave off try- 
ing." To-day the words of this great socialist 
leader of men seem like a voice from beyond 
the grave. They are true. We must not leave 
off trying. 

When exhaustion, physical and economic, 
brings this war to an end, as I believe it must, 
the task of America and Americans will be 
heavy and responsible. It will be for us to 



THE ONRUSH OF WAR 23 

bind up the war's wounds, to soften the war's 
animosities, and to lead the way in the colossal 
work of reconstruction that must follow. Then 
if our heads are clear, our hearts strong, and 
our aims unselfish — and if our nation continues 
to show that it means always to keep its own 
plighted word — we may gain new honor and 
imperishable fame for our country. We may 
yet live to see our great policies of peace, of 
freedom from entangling alliances, of a world 
concert instead of a continental balance of 
power, of an international judiciary and an in- 
ternational police, of international co-operation 
instead of international suspicion, generally 
assented to, and, as a result, the world's re- 
sources set free to improve the lot of peoples, 
to advance science and scholarship, and to 
raise humanity to a level yet unheard of. Here 
lies the path of national glory for us, and here 
is the call to action in the near future. 

It is often darkest just before the dawn, 
and the hope of mankind may lie in a direc- 
tion other than that Europe toward which we 
are now looking so anxiously. Arthur Hugh 
Clough's noble verses are an inspiration to us 
at this hour: 



24 THE ONRUSH OF WAR 

" Say not the struggle naught availeth, 
The labour and the wounds are vain, 
The enemy faints not, nor faileth, 

And as things have been they remain. 



For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
Seem here no painful inch to gain, 

Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 

And not by eastern windows only, 

When daylight comes, comes in the light; 

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly! 
But westward, look, the land is bright!" 



Ill 

THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 



An Interview with Edward Marshall printed in the New 
York Times, October 18, 191 4 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

What will be in substance a United States of 
Europe, a more or less formal federation of the 
self-governing countries of Europe, may be 
the outcome of the demonstrated failure of the 
existing national system to adjust government 
to the growth of civilization. The ending of 
the present war may see the rising of the sun 
of democracy to light a new day of freedom 
even for those of our transatlantic neighbors 
who now seem most remote from it. 

Thinking men in all the contending nations 
are beginning seriously to consider such a con- 
tingency, to argue for it or against it; in other 
words, to regard it as an undoubted possibility. 

The European cataclysm puts the people of 
the United States in a unique and tremendously 
important position. As neutrals we are able 
to observe events and to learn the lessons that 
they teach. If we learn rightly we may gain 
for ourselves and be able to confer upon others 
benefits far more important than any of the 
material advantages which may come to us 

27 



28 THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

through a shrewd handling of the new possi- 
bilities in international trade. 

Prophecy is always hazardous, and never 
more so than now, but it seems clear that the 
world is at the crossroads and that everything 
may depend upon the United States, which 
has been thrust by events into a unique posi- 
tion of moral leadership. Whether the march 
of the future is to be to the right or to the left, 
up hill or down, after the war is over, may well 
depend upon the course this nation shall now 
take, and upon the influence which it shall 
exercise. If we keep our heads clear there are 
two things that we can bring insistently to the 
attention of Europe — each of vast import at 
such a time as that which will follow the end- 
ing of the war. 

The first of these is the fact that race antag- 
onisms tend to die away and disappear under 
the influence of liberal and enlightened political 
institutions. This has been proved in the 
United States. We have huge Celtic, Latin, 
Teutonic, and Slavonic populations all living 
here at peace and in harmony; and as years 
pass they tend to merge, creating new and 
homogeneous types. The Old World antago- 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 29 

nisms have become memories. This proves 
that such antagonisms are not mysterious attri- 
butes of geography or of climate, but that they 
are the outgrowth chiefly of social and political 
conditions. Here a man can do about what 
he likes, so long as he does not violate the law; 
he may pray as he pleases or not at all, and 
he may speak any language that he chooses. 
The United States is itself proof that most of 
the contentions of Europeans as to race an- 
tagonisms are ill-founded. We have demon- 
strated that racial antagonisms need not nec- 
essarily become the basis of permanent hatred 
and an excuse for war. 

If human beings are given the chance they 
will make the most of themselves, and by liv- 
ing happily — which means living in justice 
and at peace — they will avoid conflict. The 
hyphen tends to disappear from American ter- 
minology. The German-American, the Italo- 
American, the Irish-American all become Amer- 
icans. So, by and large, our institutions have 
proved their capacity to amalgamate and to 
set free every type of human being which thus 
far has come under our flag. There is in this 
a lesson which may well be taken seriously to 



So THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

heart by the leaders of opinion in Europe when 
this war ends. 

The second thing which we may with pro- 
priety press upon the attention of the people 
of Europe after peace comes to them, is the 
fact that we are not only the great exponents, 
but the great example, of the success of the 
principle of federation as a basis of unity in 
political life regardless of local, economic, and 
racial differences. If our fathers had attempted 
to organize this country upon the basis of a 
single, closely unified State, it w T ould have gone 
to smash almost at the outset, wrecked by 
clashing economic and personal interests. In- 
deed, this nearly happened in the civil war, 
which was more economic than political in its 
origin. But, though we had our difficulties, 
we did find a way to make a unified nation of 
a hundred million people and forty-eight com- 
monwealths, all bound together in unity and 
in loyalty to a common political ideal and a 
common political purpose. Why is not this 
principle of federation, not in all its details but 
in its fundamentals, applicable to a group of 
European States that wish to achieve a com- 
mon purpose ? 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 31 

There might readily be a federation into the 
United States of Europe. 

When one nation sets out to assert itself by 
force against the will, or even the wish, of its 
neighbors, disaster must inevitably come. Dis- 
aster would have come here if, in 1789, New 
York had endeavored to assert itself against 
New England or Pennsylvania. As a matter 
of fact certain inhabitants of Rhode Island and 
of Pennsylvania did try something of the sort 
after the Federal Government had been formed, 
but, fortunately, their effort was a failure. The 
leaders of our national life had established so 
flexible and so admirable a plan of government 
that it was soon apparent that each State could 
retain its identity, form its own ideals and 
shape its own progress, and still remain a loyal 
part of the whole nation; that each State could 
make a place for itself in the new federation 
and not be destroyed thereby. 

There is no reason why each nation in 
Europe should not make a place for itself in 
the sun of unity which I feel sure is rising 
there behind the war-clouds. Europe's stu- 
pendous economic loss, which already has been 
appalling and will soon be incalculable, will 



32 THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

give us an opportunity to press this argument 
home. 

True internationalism is not the enemy of 
the nationalistic principle. On the contrary, 
it helps true nationalism to thrive. The Ver- 
monter is more a Vermonter because he is an 
American, and there is no reason why Hun- 
gary, for example, should not be more than 
ever before Hungarian after it becomes a mem- 
ber of the United States of Europe. 

Europe, of course, is not without examples 
of the successful application of the principle of 
federation within itself. It so happens that 
the federated State next greatest to our own 
is the German Empire. It is only forty-three 
years old, but there federation has been nota- 
bly successful. The idea of federation is per- 
fectly familiar to German publicists. 

It is familiar, also, to the English, and has 
lately been pressed as the probable final solu- 
tion of the Irish question. It has insistently 
suggested itself as the solution of the Balkan 
problem. In a lesser way it already is repre- 
sented in the structure of Austria-Hungary. 
This principle of nation-building, of interna- 
tional building through federation, certainly 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 33 

has in it the seeds of the world's next great 
development — and we Americans are in a posi- 
tion both to expound the theory and to illus- 
trate the practice. This may be the greatest 
work which America will have to do at the end 
of this war. 

The cataclysm is so awful that it is quite 
within the bounds of truth to say that the 
world can never again be the same as it 
was. This conflict is the birth-throe of a new 
European order of things. The man who at- 
tempts to judge the future by the old standards 
or to force the future back to them will be 
found to be hopelessly out of date. The world 
will have no use for him. The world has left 
behind forever the international policies of 
Palmerston and of Beaconsfield and even those 
of Bismarck, which were far more powerful. 
When the war ends, conditions will be such 
that a new kind of imagination and a new 
kind of statesmanship will be required. This 
war will prove to be the most effective edu- 
cation of 500,000,000 people which could pos- 
sibly have been thought of, although it is the 
most costly and most terrible means which 
could have been chosen. The results of this 



34 THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

education will be shown in the process of 
general reconstruction which will doubtless 
follow. 

All the talk of which so much is heard about 
the peril from the Slav or from the Teuton or 
from the Celt is unworthy of serious attention. 
It would be quite as reasonable to discuss seri- 
ously the red-headed peril or the six-footer 
peril. There is no peril to the world in the 
Slav, the Teuton, the Celt, or any other race, 
provided the people of that race have an op- 
portunity to develop as social and economic 
units, and are not so bound and confined by 
tyranny as to force an explosion, or so deluded 
by militarism and national chauvinism as to 
become a public danger. It is not races but 
wrong ideas that are dangerous. 

No form of government will long be toler- 
ated which does not set men free to develop 
in their own way. 

The international organization of the world 
already has progressed much farther than is 
ordinarily understood. Ever since the Franco- 
Prussian war and the Geneva Arbitration, 
both landmarks in modern history, this organi- 
zation has advanced inconspicuously, but by 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 35 

leaps and bounds. The postal service of the 
world has been internationalized in its control 
for years. The several Postal Conventions 
have given evidences of an international ad- 
ministrative organization of the highest order. 
Europe abounds in illustrations of the interna- 
tional administration of large things. The very 
laws of war, which are at present the subject 
of so much and such bitter discussion, are the 
result of international organization. They were 
not adopted by a Congress, a Parliament, or a 
Reichstag. They were agreed to by many and 
divergent peoples, who sent representatives to 
meet for their discussion and determination. 
In the admiralty law we have a most striking 
example of uniformity of practice in all parts 
of the world. If a ship is captured or harmed 
in the Far East and taken into Yokohama or 
Nagasaki, damages will be assessed and col- 
lected precisely as they would be in New York 
or Liverpool. The world is gradually develop- 
ing a code for international legal procedure. 
Special arbitral tribunals have tended to merge 
and to grow into the international court at 
The Hague, and that in turn will develop until 
it becomes a real supreme judicial tribunal. 



36 THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

Of course the analogy between the federated 
State and a federation of nations fails at some 
points, but the time will come when each 
nation will deposit in a world federation some 
portion of its sovereignty for the general good. 
When this happens it will be possible to estab- 
lish an international executive and an inter- 
national police, both devised for the especial 
purpose of enforcing the decisions of the inter- 
national court. 

Here, again, the United States offers a per- 
fect object-lesson. Its central government is 
one of limited and defined powers. Its history 
can show Europe how such limitations and 
definitions may be established and interpreted, 
and how they may be modified and amended 
when necessary to meet new conditions. There 
will be annotated reports of the decisions of the 
several international arbitration tribunals and 
of the international court of justice, in order 
that the governments and jurists of the world 
may have at hand, as they have in the United 
States Supreme Court reports, a record of de- 
cided cases, which, when the time comes, may 
be referred to as precedents. It will be through 
gradual processes such as these that the great 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 37 

end will be accomplished. Beginning with 
such annotated reports as a basis for prece- 
dents, each new case tried before this tribunal 
will add a farther precedent, and presently a 
complete international code will be in exist- 
ence. It was in this way that the English com- 
mon law was built, and such has been the his- 
tory of the admirable work done by our own 
judicial system. The study of such problems 
as these is at this time infinitely more impor- 
tant than the consideration of how large a fine 
shall be inflicted by the victors upon the van- 
quished. 

There is the probability of some dislocation 
of territory and some shiftings of sovereignty 
after the war ends, but these will be of com- 
paratively minor importance. 

Dislocation of territory and the shifting of 
sovereigns as the result of international disa- 
greements are mediaeval practices. After this 
war the world will want to solve its problems 
in terms of the future, not in those of the out- 
grown past. The important result of this 
great war will be the stimulation of interna- 
tional organization along some such lines as 
those suggested. 



3 8 THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

Conventional diplomacy and conventional 
statesmanship have very evidently broken 
down in Europe. They have made a disas- 
trous failure of the work with which they were 
intrusted. They did not and could not pre- 
vent the war because they knew and used only 
the old formulas. They had no tools for a 
job like this. A new type of international 
statesman is certain to arise, a statesman who 
will have a grasp of new tendencies, a new 
outlook upon life. Bismarck used to say that 
it would pay any nation to wear the clean 
linen of a civilized State. The truth of this 
must be taught to those nations of the world 
which are weakest in morale, and it can only 
be done as similar work is accomplished with 
individuals. Courts, not killings, have accom- 
plished it with individuals. 

One more point ought to be remembered. 
We sometimes hear it said that nationalism, 
the desire for national expression by each indi- 
vidual nation, makes the permanent peace and 
good order of the world impossible. It seems 
absurd to believe that this is any truer of na- 
tions than it is of individuals. It is not each 
nation's desire for national expression which 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 39 

makes peace impossible; it is the fact that thus 
far in the world's history such desire has been 
bound up with militarism. The nation whose 
frontier bristles with bayonets and with forts 
is like the individual with a magazine pistol in 
his pocket. Both make for murder. Both in 
their hearts really mean murder. The world 
will be better when the nations invite the judg- 
ment of their neighbors and are influenced by 
it. When John Hay said that the Golden Rule 
and the Open Door should guide our new diplo- 
macy, he said something which should be ap- 
plicable to the new diplomacy of the whole 
world. The Golden Rule and a free chance 
are all that any man ought to want or ought 
to have, and they are all that any nation ought 
to want or ought to have. 

One of the controlling principles of a demo- 
cratic State is that its military and naval 
establishments must be completely subservient 
to the civil power. They should form the po- 
lice, and not be the dominant factor of any 
nation's life. As soon as they go beyond this 
simple function in any nation, then that nation 
is afflicted with militarism. 

It is difficult to make predictions as to the 



4 o THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

war's effect on us. Our position will depend 
a good deal upon the outcome of the conflict, 
and what that will be no one at present can 
tell. If a new map of Europe follows the war, 
its permanence will depend upon whether or 
not the changes are such as will permit nation- 
alities to organize as nations. The world 
should have learned through the lessons of the 
past that it is impossible permanently and 
peacefully to submerge large bodies of aliens 
if they are treated as aliens. That is the op- 
posite of the mixing process which is still 
building a nation out of varied nationalities 
in the United States. The old Romans un- 
derstood this. They permitted their outlying 
vassal nations to speak any language they 
chose and to worship whatever god they chose, 
so long as they recognized the sovereignty of 
Rome. When a conquering nation goes beyond 
that and begins to suppress religions, languages, 
and customs, it also begins, at that very mo- 
ment, to sow the seeds of insurrection and 
revolution. 

A true nation has been defined as an ethno- 
graphic unit inhabiting a geographic unit. 
That is an illuminating definition. If a nation 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 41 

is not an ethnographic unit, it tries to become 
one by oppressing or amalgamating the weaker 
portions of its people. If it is not a geographic 
unit, it tries to become one by reaching out to 
a mountain chain or to the sea — to something 
which will serve as a real dividing-line between 
it and its next neighbors. The accuracy of 
this definition can hardly be denied, and we 
all know what the violations of this principle 
have been in Europe. It is unnecessary to 
point them out. 

Races rarely have been successfully mixed 
by conquest. The military victor in a war is 
not always the real conqueror in the long run. 
The Normans conquered Saxon England, but 
Saxon law and Saxon institutions worked up 
through the new power and have dominated 
England's later history. The Teutonic tribes 
conquered Rome, but Roman civilization, by 
a sort of capillary attraction, went up into the 
mass above and presently dominated the Teu- 
tons. The persistency of a civilization may 
well be superior in tenacity to mere military 
conquest and control. 

The smallness of the number of instances in 
which conquering nations have been able sue- 



42 THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

cessfully to deal with alien peoples is extraordi- 
nary. The Romans were usually successful, 
and England has been successful with all but 
the Irish; but perhaps no other peoples have 
been successful in high degree in an effort to 
hold alien populations as vassals or as fellow 
subjects and to make them really happy and 
comfortable as such. 

One of the war's chief effects on us will be 
to change our point of view. Europe will be 
more vivid to us from now on. There are 
many American public men who have never 
thought much about Europe, and who have 
been far from a realization of its actual impor- 
tance to us. It has been a place in which 
to pass a summer holiday. But suddenly 
Americans find they cannot sell their cotton in 
Europe or their copper, that they cannot mar- 
ket their stocks and bonds there, that they can- 
not send money to their families who are trav- 
elling there, because there is a war. To such 
men the war must have made it apparent that 
interdependence among nations is more than a 
mere phrase. Our entire trade and all our 
economic and social policies must recognize this 
fact. The world has discovered that money 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 43 

without credit means little. One cannot use 
money if one cannot use one's credit to draw 
it whenever and wherever needed. Credit is 
intangible and volatile, and may be destroyed 
overnight. International credit implies na- 
tional interdependence. 

This realization of national interdependence 
will elevate and refine our patriotism by 
teaching men a wider sympathy and a deeper 
understanding of other peoples, nations, and 
languages. I sincerely hope it will educate us 
up to what I have called "the international 
mind." 

There are hopeful signs, even in the midst 
of the gloom that hangs over us. Think what 
it has meant for the great nations of Europe to 
come to us, as they have done, asking our 
favorable public opinion. We have no army 
and no navy worthy of their fears. They can 
have been induced by nothing save their con- 
viction that we are the possessors of sound 
political ideals and are a great moral force in 
the world. In other words, they do not now 
want us to fight for them, but they do want 
us to approve of them. They want us to pass 
judgment upon the humanity and the legality 



44 TEE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

of their acts, because they feel that our judg- 
ment will be the judgment of history. There 
is a lesson in this. 

If we had not repealed the Panama Canal 
Tolls Exemption act in June, 1914, the Euro- 
pean nations might not have come to us as 
they are doing now. Who would have cared 
for our opinion in the matter of a treaty viola- 
tion if, for mere financial interest or from sheer 
vanity, we ourselves had violated a solemn 
treaty ? When Congress repealed the Panama 
Canal Tolls Exemption act it marked an epoch 
in the history of the United States. This did 
more than the Spanish War, more than the 
building of the Panama Canal or than any- 
thing else I can think of to make us a true 
world power. As a nation we have kept our 
word when sorely tempted to break it. We 
made Cuba independent, we have not exploited 
the Philippines, we have stood by our word as 
to Panama Canal tolls. 

In consequence we are the first moral power 
in the world to-day. Others may be first 
with armies, still others first with navies. But 
we have made good our right to be appealed 
to on questions of national and international 



THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 45 

morality. That Europe is seeking our favor is 
the acknowledgment of this fact by the Euro- 
pean nations and their tribute to it. 



IV 



THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD 
POWER 



An Interview with Edward Marshall printed in the 
New York Times , May 16, 191 5 






THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD 
POWER 

When one speaks of the United States as a 
world power, and of its future opportunities as 
such, one must stop to ask whether he is using 
the term " world power" in the military sense 
with reference to the rule of force, or in the 
moral sense with reference to the rule of ideals 
and of law. The history of the world makes 
it pretty plain that there is a distinction be- 
tween the two. 

Our present-day philosophy of life makes it 
equally plain that it is world power resting on 
ideals and on law that the United States should 
aim at — the world power of the future — and 
not the sort of world power which rests on 
force— the world power of the past. With the 
passing of the years, with the increase in area 
and the multiplication of population, the 
United States has become at once the largest, 
the richest, and the most powerful exemplar 
of democratic institutions on the globe. Any 
claim which it may have to being a world 

49 



50 THE UNITED STATES 

power to-day and any hope which it may have 
of increasing or extending this world power in 
future must rest upon its being true to the 
ideals and aims of democracy, not only in form 
but in spirit and in fact. The very just in- 
dignation of the American people at the de- 
struction of the Lusitania, involving, as it did, 
the loss of hundreds of lives of neutrals and 
non-combatants, including many women and 
children, as well as the inexplicable attack 
upon the American ship Gulfiight, only empha- 
size the necessity of maintaining our purpose 
to enforce the rights which attach to neutrals. 
To do this successfully will of itself be a mani- 
festation of world power on a great scale. The 
present situation is very acute and very diffi- 
cult, but it ought not and I think will not be 
beyond the power of the American government 
and the American people to deal with it in a 
spirit of justice that will both emphasize and 
enforce our position as a neutral nation and 
resist any effort to cloud the issue by irrelevant 
appeals. 

It is a fact that the way in which the neu- 
trality of the United States has been mani- 
fested in the present war has not wholly com- 



AS A WORLD POWER 51 

mended us as a people to any one of the 
belligerent powers. This, perhaps, was to be 
expected, but it would be unfortunate if any 
feeling of criticism of the United States for 
having done some things and for having omit- 
ted to do others, should extend to the point 
of weakening European confidence in the abil- 
ity and willingness of the American people to 
do justice between the belligerents and the 
policies they represent when this war shall 
come to an end, or in their capacity to grasp 
the real underlying issues of the war itself. 

The notion that the present struggle is 
merely a European war, in which no one has 
any interest except the governments and citi- 
zens of the several belligerent powers is gro- 
tesque. It is a world war in which every neu- 
tral power is more or less involved, and the 
huge cost of which every neutral power will be 
called upon to share more or less heavily. It 
may be safely predicted that when the bills are 
all in and receipted a generation or two hence, 
the cost to the people of the United States will 
prove to have been stupendous. All these are 
reasons why the world power of the American 
democracy ought of right to be exerted and 



52 THE UNITED STATES 

should, as a matter of policy and of national 
interest, be exerted when hostilities shall end, 
to compose the differences and the difficulties 
out of which this war has grown, and to remove 
their causes; and they are also reasons why 
nothing should be done which will weaken our 
world influence. 

It is a very difficult and delicate matter to 
suggest to another people that one's ov/n form 
of government is better than that which, at 
the moment, others enjoy. This is something 
which the United States could not formally or 
officially do. Nevertheless, it would be sheer 
hypocrisy to conceal the fact that the public 
opinion of the United States is substantially 
unanimous in holding that the peace of the 
world is more secure when foreign relations 
and foreign policies are determined and con- 
trolled by representatives of the people, than 
when these are wholly confided to dynasties 
or to diplomats, however beloved or however 
talented. The democratic principle cannot be 
said to insure international peace, but with 
equal certainty it can be said to make im- 
possible certain kinds of war. It makes im- 
possible all those numerous wars that grow out 



AS A WORLD POWER 53 

of dynastic ambitions and policies, out of se- 
cret alliances and out of confidential under- 
standings of one sort and another between 
monarchs and foreign offices. The democratic 
principle for which the United States stands 
and which, after allowing for all mistakes and 
inequities, it has done so much to advance, 
diminishes the chance of conflict based upon 
difference in religion and difference in race, 
by insisting that neither of these differences 
be given any recognition before the law. It is 
obvious that if the United States is to achieve 
and to exercise a world power based upon its 
sincere democracy, we must have a care that 
at home these principles are always kept clearly 
in mind and are not departed from in our own 
political practice. We have among us a good 
many persons, and some groups of importance 
and considerable size, that are not inclined to 
be any too particular about insisting upon the 
application of these fundamental democratic 
principles, if, by overlooking them, they them- 
selves can gain some immediate political or 
personal end. To all such it may be pointed 
out that while, of course, a nation must protect 
itself, morally, intellectually, and physically, 



54 TEE UNITED STATES 

yet it must protect itself by the application of 
its fundamental principles and not by the denial 
or forgetfulness of them. 

One trait the people of the United States 
possess to an extent that never before has been 
recorded in the history of any nation, and that 
is the admirable trait of generosity and of sym- 
pathy for the distressed, the afflicted, and the 
stricken in any part of the world. Recognition 
of this fact must add greatly to our world in- 
fluence. At the very time that some European 
observers have been denouncing the American 
people as mere traders, making money and 
gain out of the distressful conflict in Europe, 
those same American people have been pour- 
ing out not only millions of dollars, but life, 
energy, and service in the effort to carry food 
and clothing to the starving and ill-clad Bel- 
gians, to eliminate the fearful plague of typhus 
in Serbia, and to aid in giving the best medical 
and surgical service to the sick and wounded 
in the armies of Germany, Austria, Russia, 
France, and Great Britain. It may very well 
be doubted if anywhere in history there is re- 
corded an equal display, prompt and over- 
whelming, of generous aid and tender human 



AS A WORLD POWER 55 

sympathy, regardless of the station, rank, na- 
tionality, or opinions of those who needed help. 
These facts reveal a people playing the Good 
Samaritan on a huge scale, and they illustrate 
what is meant by world leadership based on 
ideals. The nation whose people render ser- 
vices like these will never be forgotten in tens 
of thousands of villages and farm firesides all 
the way from the North Sea to the Cau- 
casus. 

If one is asked what power the United States 
can exert at the conclusion of this war, no defi- 
nite answer can be given at the moment, be- 
cause everything will depend upon which of 
the combatants is victorious. In any case, 
however, the United States ought to direct the 
attention of the nations now belligerent to 
these specific points: 

First, that the various Hague Conventions, 
solemnly entered into in 1899 and in 1907, have 
been violated frequently since the outbreak of 
hostilities, and that, obviously, some greater 
and more secure sanction for such Conventions 
must be provided in the future. 

Second, that in not a few instances the 
rules and usages of international law have been 



56 THE UNITED STATES 

thrown to the winds, to the discredit of the 
belligerents themselves and to the grave dis- 
tress, physically and commercially, of neutral 
powers. 

Of course every one understands that inter- 
national law is merely a series of conventions 
without other than moral sanction. If, how- 
ever, the world has gone back to the point 
where a nation's plighted faith is not moral 
sanction enough, then that fact and its impli- 
cations ought to be clearly understood and 
appropriate punitive action provided for. 

Third, that any attempt to submerge na- 
tionalities in nations other than their own is 
certain to result in friction and conflict in the 
not distant future. Any attempt to create 
new nations, or to enlarge or diminish the area 
of nations, without having regard to national- 
ity, is simply to organize a future war. 

Fourth, that the transfer of sovereignty over 
any given district or people without their con- 
sent is certainly an unwise and probably an 
unjust action for any government to take, 
having regard for the peace and happiness of 
the world. 

Fifth, that the international organization 



AS A WORLD POWER 57 

which had been carried so far in such fields as 
maritime law, postal service, railway service, 
and international arbitration, should be taken 
up anew and pursued more vigorously, but 
upon a sounder and a broader foundation, and 
made a certain means of protecting the smaller 
and the weaker nations. 

Sixth, that competitive armaments, instead 
of being an assurance against war, are a sure 
cause of war and an equally certain preventive 
of those policies of social reform and advance 
that enlightened peoples everywhere are eager 
to pursue. 

Everything would depend upon the sincer- 
ity, the good temper, and the sympathy with 
which suggestions such as these were made 
and followed up. A first step toward the ac- 
complishment of these ends is to create what 
some of us have long hoped for and felt to be 
possible, and what Mr. Asquith, in one of the 
greatest speeches made since the war began, 
clearly indicated to be within the range of 
practical statesmanship — namely, a method by 
which the nations of Europe may be so or- 
ganized as to develop a common will. When 
that step is taken then the United States can 



58 THE UNITED STATES 

point out the lessons which the history of our 
own federal system so clearly teaches. 

No one in his senses could suppose that 
Europe, with its varied races and languages, 
could ever be welded into such a national unit 
as the United States, where a diverse popula- 
tion rests on a common English speech and 
the English common law; but the principle 
which the United States Government exempli- 
fies is applicable, in my judgment, mutatis mu- 
tandis, to a United States of Europe. The be- 
ginnings of the central organ of the common 
will would probably be very simple and very 
slight. They might be chiefly judicial in char- 
acter; if so, then so much the better. It will 
not be forgotten that some of the justices of 
the first United States Supreme Court wanted 
to resign because no case came before the Court 
for a year after it was organized. They said 
there was apparently no need for such a court 
and that there was nothing for it to do. 

The world could very well afford to have 
Europe begin in the same simple way and trust 
to the force of ideas and the interest of nations 
in co-operation — their financial, their commer- 
cial, their intellectual interest — to strengthen 



AS A WORLD POWER 59 

and to develop whatever organ they chose to 
create at the outset. 

The greatest achievements of the United 
States have always tended toward peace, even 
when they have been warlike. The Spanish 
War was not an attack upon a people at peace, 
but a war for the purpose of stopping war. 
The events of the early spring and the summer 
of 1898 are sometimes spoken of as the Span- 
ish-American War. To me they have always 
seemed more like the doing of such work as the 
police and fire departments combined might be 
called upon to perform in a great city. What 
was done then by the United States was, to all 
intents and purposes, to suppress a riot and to 
put out a conflagration. If the United States 
had enriched itself as a result of that action by 
annexing the island of Cuba, the action itself 
would have lost all its moral significance. 

Through the action taken at the instance of 
Senator Teller of Colorado and that taken at 
the instance of Senator Piatt of Connecticut — 
although in fairness to both the living and the 
dead it ought to be said that the strongest in- 
fluence in drafting the Piatt Amendment was 
that of Elihu Root — the United States made it 



60 TEE UNITED STATES 

plain that what it was doing was done in the 
interest of the people of Cuba and in the inter- 
est of humanity. In the large sense, therefore, 
this whole undertaking was a policy making 
for peace, for good order, for human happiness. 
In the same way it was to a President of the 
United States and to his Secretary of State 
that the governments of Japan and Russia 
turned, in the spring of 1905, with a view to 
securing assistance in bringing the costly and 
bloody conflict in Manchuria to an end. Both 
through its action in regard to Cuba and its 
action in regard to the Russo-Japanese War, 
to say nothing of its consistent attitude toward 
the government and the people of China, the 
United States has won the regard and the 
respect of thoughtful and liberal-minded men 
in all parts of the globe. It is such acts as 
these which promote world confidence in us 
and assure world power for us. 

It is not possible to touch upon these topics 
without some mention of Mexico, where condi- 
tions are extremely difficult and very perplex- 
ing. There is no use now in discussing what 
might have been done three years ago or two 
years ago that would have led to an improve- 



AS A WORLD POWER 61 

ment in the existing situation. The undisputed 
facts are that chaos rules in Mexico, that 
American lives have been sacrificed and others 
are in danger, and that much property belong- 
ing to Americans has been damaged or de- 
stroyed, and more of it is still threatened with 
damage or destruction. Is it quite clear that 
the people of the United States have no duty 
whatever in regard to this matter, but should 
merely stand aside and let the various armed 
bands of Mexicans kill each other indefinitely, 
as well as destroy the lives and property, not 
only of Americans, but of citizens of European 
nations ? Are we or are we not our brothers' 
keepers ? These questions are not to be lightly 
answered, for anything that would plunge us 
into war with the Mexican people, or anything 
that might possibly lead to an extension of our 
territory or increase of our wealth at their ex- 
pense, would be deplorable, and perhaps dis- 
astrous to us. Nor could we take any line of 
action that would expose us to suspicion in the 
minds of other American republics on the ground 
that the United States, as an Anglo-Saxon and 
Anglo-Celtic nation, was oppressing a Latin 
people or aggrandizing itself at their expense. 



62 THE UNITED STATES 

The policy which most commends itself to my 
judgment, if a task similar to that performed 
seventeen years ago in Cuba ultimately be- 
comes necessary, is to communicate our plans 
and policies to the governments of the other 
American republics and to ask the co-opera- 
tion of at least some of them — for example, 
that of Argentina, Brazil, Chili, Uruguay, and 
Peru — in putting into effect whatever policies 
of a police character were jointly determined 
to be necessary in the interest of civilization 
and that of the Mexican people themselves. If 
it be objected that no one of these American 
republics has any direct interest in Mexico, 
the answer is that we have a very direct inter- 
est in having them have a sufficient interest 
in Mexico to protect us from misunderstanding 
and unfriendly criticism on their own part. 

It is earnestly to be hoped that the Mexican 
people will speedily find some way of restoring 
orderly government for themselves, but it must 
be confessed that every week that passes makes 
the prospect of this seem less likely. Of course, 
it is not possible for a policeman or a fireman 
to attempt to settle a row in the street with- 
out running some risk of getting hurt, but that 



AS A WORLD POWER 63 

risk would be reduced to a minimum if the con- 
fidence and co-operation of a half-dozen other 
American republics were secured before the 
task was undertaken at all. Such an act would, 
of itself, be an illustration of what is meant by 
exercising world power. It would illustrate the 
value of bringing other free and enlightened 
peoples to our side to perform a public-spirited 
act, and it would illustrate and emphasize the 
moral purpose of performing that act in the 
interest of Mexico and the Mexican people 
without any thought or purpose of self-aggran- 
dizement. It would give a new and generous 
interpretation to the Monroe Doctrine. 

Our people have not yet appreciated how 
much we need, and would profit by, closer 
friendship and fuller understanding with the 
peoples of the other American republics. Every 
one of the efforts now being made to bring 
those peoples nearer to us, to understand more 
completely their point of view, their history, 
their literature, their institutions, and every 
effort to break down the barrier of language 
which separates us, deserve the heartiest sup- 
port. The relation we seek with them is not a 
relation in which we are to exercise power, but 



64 THE UNITED STATES 

one in which we and they together are to exer- 
cise an influence that is higher and better than 
mere power, because it is the outgrowth of our 
common devotion to democratic institutions 
and our complete and sympathetic understand- 
ing of what the very word America typifies 
and signifies. 

There are other things which indicate a 
growth of such world power in the hands of 
the United States. Robert College at Con- 
stantinople on the banks of the Bosporus, and 
the American Protestant College at Beirut in 
Syria, are two of the most extraordinary exam- 
ples of American influence anywhere in the 
world. Practically every leader of the liberal 
movement in Bulgaria has been educated in 
Robert College, which is supported entirely by 
American money, and the most enlightened 
young Turks, Arabs, and Greeks are to be found 
among the 400 or 500 students in the Syrian 
Protestant College at Beirut. These institu- 
tions represent the New England college trans- 
ferred to the shores of the Mediterranean and 
to the banks of the Bosporus, and they are 
teaching, not only the usual letters, science, 
and philosophy, but American ideals, American 



AS A WORLD POWER 65 

thought, American institutions to the young 
men who are shaping or are going to shape the 
civilization of the Eastern Mediterranean coun- 
tries. 

A great many of our European friends be- 
lieve, as I myself believe, that a concomitant 
and necessary element of international peace is 
industrial peace, and there has recently been 
sent to Europe all the information obtainable 
regarding Mr. Henry Ford's profit-sharing un- 
dertaking at Detroit, and also that regarding 
the United States Steel Corporation's capital 
plan for caring for and helping its workers. 
All this helps to build up world power for 
the United States. This is what is meant by 
the peaceful infiltration of ideas. It goes 
much further than the work of the diploma- 
tist; it works away down under the surface of 
life. 



V 
PATRIOTISM 






An Address delivered before the Newport Historical 
Society, Newport, R. I., August 16, 191 5 






PATRIOTISM 

A society like this — one of many score, many 
hundred, in this country and in other lands — is 
a very hearthstone of patriotism. It is by 
labors and by sacrifices such as yours that 
careful, affectionate, and accurate record is 
made of men and women, of happenings, of 
events, of undertakings, of movements of 
opinion and of action that are worth remember- 
ing. Your Society and other societies like- 
minded bring these records together, and make 
of them a hearthstone on which the fire of pa- 
triotism begins to burn; for the beginning of 
patriotism is love of home and all that home 
means, and through it comes the entering into 
the hopes and ideals and purposes of that larger 
home which constitutes our country. 

Perhaps you have not all reflected upon 
what this thing called patriotism is and how 
recently it has come into the history of man. 
There was nothing corresponding to what we 
mean by patriotism in the older world. There 
was loyalty to race; there was something ap- 

69 



70 PATRIOTISM 

proaching patriotism, perhaps, in the life of the 
Greek or Roman city; there was loyalty to rul- 
ing monarchs or dynasties; there was pride of 
origin or opinion; but so long as the nations of 
Europe and America were in the making, so 
long as life was fluid, and men were moving 
uneasily and rapidly over the face of the earth, 
without fixed habitat or permanent institutions, 
there was nothing corresponding to what we 
know as patriotism. Nor is patriotism com- 
patible with any ambition for world-empire or 
dominion. So long as there was hope of bring- 
ing the whole world under the dominion of a 
single form of religion or under the control of 
a single governing power — so long as those 
dreams flitted before the eyes and minds of 
men — there was nothing corresponding to what 
we know as patriotism. 

Patriotism began to rise when the modern 
nations took on their form; when each group 
of men found itself in a separate and substan- 
tially fixed habitat; when unity of language 
began to develop; when literature sprang up on 
the wings of language; when institutions and 
achievements began to appear and to organize 
themselves; and when men began to convene 



PATRIOTISM 71 

and to feel the need of a social and political life 
that had an end or a purpose of its own which 
they could understand and teach to their chil- 
dren. When there was something that could 
be handed down, some theory of life, some the- 
ory of social relationship, some theory of the 
status which each man bears to his fellow, then 
there began to emerge the materials out of 
which patriotism is made. 

But only a hundred and fifty years ago, more 
or less, the word had a very sinister and ugly 
meaning. I remember once reading in the 
letters of Horace Walpole the statement that 
the most helpful declaration that could be 
made upon the hustings in England, was that 
the speaker was not then and never had been 
a patriot. For in the seventeenth century and 
in the early part of the eighteenth, the word 
patriot was almost synonymous with dis- 
turber, with revolutionist — almost synony- 
mous with anarchist, as we use the term so 
frequently, and often so incorrectly, to-day. 

Later, particularly in connection with the 
beginning of the life of this nation, the words 
"patriot" and "patriotism" began to take on 
a healthier, a more sympathetic, and a finer 



72 PATRIOTISM 

meaning, and those healthier, more sympa- 
thetic, and finer meanings have attached them- 
selves to these words, until now the idea they 
convey and represent is one to which we are 
all glad to do honor. 

A patriot is a man who stands to his country 
in the relation of a father to his child. He 
loves it; he cares for it; he makes sacrifices for 
it; he fights for it; he serves it; he tries to shape 
its course of thought and action, that it may 
most perfectly adhere to its purpose and its 
ideal. 

We do not know — and no history, no sci- 
ence, no philosophy is yet wise enough fully 
to instruct us — the significance and meaning of 
each of the great civilizations of the modern 
world; but despite the present desperate and 
fearful clash of arms, we may be sure that 
there is a place for each one of them — that each 
serves some purpose, makes some contribution, 
casts some reflection from the facet of its racial 
nature and national organization. Some pur- 
pose is fulfilled by each one of them, and each 
contributes its single beam, to help make the 
full, white light of civilization. We may be 
certain that to strike out from modern life any 



PATRIOTISM 73 

one of the great national elements which enter 
into it would be to make it poorer, and would 
be to disarrange and to throw out of harmony 
the ever-moving plan of that civilization which 
has been built up by such hard and long work 
over so many centuries. Therefore we must 
have a care that we do not define patriotism as 
a cynic once defined it, as dislike of another 
country masked in the guise of love for our 
own. 

There is no necessary conflict in the mind 
of the wise, well-instructed patriot, between 
the cause and purpose and aim of his nation 
and the cause and purpose and aim of the 
whole great group and family of nations. A 
patriot is not a termagant; he is not a destroyer 
of the peace; he is not one who treats with 
contempt or dislike his fellow who speaks 
another tongue or who owes allegiance to 
another flag or who loves another literature; 
but he is one who understands and appreciates 
how these various aspects of civilized life can 
better serve the common purpose by better 
serving each its own. 

If a man or a woman is to rise to a true ap- 
preciation of patriotism and wishes to be a 



74 PATRIOTISM 

real patriot, then he or she must reflect upon 
the purpose of organized community life. I 
think it was Bishop Berkeley — whose name is 
so closely associated with this colony and this 
settlement — who said in substance that those 
who never reflect upon the great problems of 
the end and aim and purpose of life might be 
suitable to belong to a colony of industrious 
animals, but never could rise to the height of 
being men and women. 

Instead of rhetoric, a patriot needs philoso- 
phy; instead of noisy and tumultuous expres- 
sion of high feeling, he needs serious purpose, 
insight into the significance of his own country, 
a knowledge of its history, of its great person- 
alities, of its policies, of its achievements, and 
above all, a knowledge of its aim. He must 
ask himself not only, "From what origin and 
by what steps has it come?" but more insis- 
tently and more emphatically, "Toward what 
end and toward what purpose is it moving ? 
What is the reason of it all ?" 

We Americans are fortunate above all peo- 
ples, in that those searching questions have 
been answered for us in two great classic docu- 
ments, written in language so simple that the 



PATRIOTISM 75 

mass of the people can read and understand 
them — documents which should be familiar, 
word by word, sentence by sentence, para- 
graph by paragraph, to every reflecting and 
educated American. I mean, of course, George 
Washington's Farewell Address, and the great 
Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln. 
When George Washington was asked to per- 
mit his name to be used for the third time as 
candidate for the presidency, he declined in a 
noteworthy document, addressed to his fellow 
citizens. He not only set forth the reasons — 
the personal reasons — which actuated his de- 
clination of a third term as President, but he 
went further, and expounded and commended 
to his countrymen the principles of the country 
whose father he truly was. That document — 
one of the most precious in American history 
or American literature — should be a veritable 
guide-book for the American patriot. And 
then, nearly three-quarters of a century later, 
when the epoch-making civil struggle was near- 
ing its end, the great heart of Abraham Lincoln 
poured itself out in words whose simple, com- 
pelling eloquence have rarely been equalled, 
when he for the second time ascended the steps 



76 PATRIOTISM 

of the Capitol to take the oath of office as Presi- 
dent of the United States. He, too, from an- 
other point of view, but in no less practical 
ways and with no less generous purpose, 
pressed home upon his countrymen the prin- 
ciples to which their loyalty was due. 

The American patriot will inform himself 
upon those two great documents. He will like 
to read them, to quote them, to think upon 
them, to turn to them and to their principles, 
to seek their instruction in determining his own 
position in regard to the thousand and one 
practical questions of the moment, which are 
simply the old questions of human ambition, 
human greed, and human folly, dressing them- 
selves up in new forms, and joining the never- 
ending procession of progress toward human 
excellence, that goes to make up human his- 
tory. 

The Farewell Address of Washington, and 
the Second Inaugural of Lincoln, are for the 
American a corner-stone upon which to build a 
sure and abiding structure of true patriotism. 

Our country is unique, not as we so often 
think and say because of its size, not because 
of its population, not because of its wealth, not 



PATRIOTISM 77 

because of its variety of products and climates, 
not because of its temperaments and racial 
elements — though they all enter into its great- 
ness, and will form subjects for the future his- 
torian to analyze and interpret — but it is unique 
in that we have managed for now more than a 
century and a quarter, to build into permanence 
principles of government and of life which had 
been the ideal of dreamers for more than a 
thousand years. Very few of those dreamers 
ever supposed that in the nineteenth and twen- 
tieth centuries there would arise on this earth 
a great nation, built upon those principles, 
dedicated to them, and successfully exemplify- 
ing their operation and practice over this amaz- 
ing extent of territory. No one would have 
supposed this to be possible. 

We need not stop to dwell upon our short- 
comings; we need not stop to analyze and to 
explain our feelings of difficulty and of doubt 
or to make lists of the things we should like to 
do, but have not done. All that is known and 
admitted by us, by our friends, and by our 
critics; but at a moment like this, when the 
whole world appears to be in a state of flux, 
when all old standards seem to be thrown to 



78 PATRIOTISM 

the winds, it is worth while to dwell upon the 
permanent and progressive forward movement 
in American life, and to take account and 
make measure of its achievements and its tri- 
umphs. 

This country is, in a peculiar sense, the keeper 
of the conscience of democracy. There may be 
nations — we know there are nations of the first 
rank — not committed as we are to the demo- 
cratic principle. We need find no fault with 
them for preferring, temporarily at least, some 
other form of social and political organization; 
but we must bear in mind that we are the keep- 
ers of the democratic conscience of the world. 
We are the keepers of the open door of oppor- 
tunity in democracy; and we are the keepers 
of the great principle of federation as a means 
of securing domestic freedom and national 
unity, and of permitting liberty under law in 
ways with which we have now been familiar 
for nearly a century and a half. 

The greatest proble'm of men in all history 
has been the question how to secure both gov- 
ernment and liberty. How to preserve order 
without suppression of the individual, how to 
promote the common good without depriving 



PATRIOTISM 79 

the individual of initiative, how to weld men 
into a mass, into a new and higher order, with- 
out destroying personal identity — that problem 
in its most serious sense is ours. 

The true American patriot will never permit 
himself to lose sight of the fact that the line be- 
tween government and liberty is the line upon 
which he must keep his eye, and the line toward 
which he must hew, let the chips fall where 
they will. 

If all individual initiative be transferred to 
the realm of government, we have no oppor- 
tunity for that individual life which has been 
the glory of our modern, wo rid. If we transfer 
all the fundamental elements of a well-ordered 
government over to the realm of liberty, we 
have national dissolution and political death. 
The American patriot, keeping his heart open 
and his mind free from prejudice, seeking 
friendships everywhere in this world and en- 
mities nowhere, keeping his eye fixed on this 
line between government and liberty, will ask 
himself how, as one of the keepers of the demo- 
cratic conscience, can he act in a given crisis, 
in the presence of a given problem, before a 
given issue — how can he act, my friends, so as 



8o PATRIOTISM 

to protect the aim and the ideals of the Ameri- 
can Republic ? 

He is a poor American who is without a pas- 
sionate love of home; who does not feel a pecu- 
liar drawing at the heart and a choking of the 
voice when his mind goes back in after-years 
to the home where his first associations were 
made, where his father and mother lived, where 
his childhood friends and associates, his school- 
teachers and schoolmates dwelt, where he got 
his first outlook on life and began to stretch 
his wings and try to fly. No temporary abid- 
ing-place, no working-place or office or house 
can ever be substituted for the home in the 
heart of the true patriot. Just so the patriot's 
feeling for his fafherland or motherland is the 
feeling he has for the nation to which he be- 
longs, the ideal to which he owes allegiance, 
the language he speaks, the literature he loves, 
and the law that determines the patriot's rela- 
tion to all of these — his intelligence, reflections, 
and emotions — the relation of the individual to 
his larger home. 

It is out of the home that the nation is built. 
It is out of the home's purposes and ideals that 
the nation gains aim and substance, and it is 



PATRIOTISM 81 

in the home that the controlling moral and in- 
tellectual principles that shape government and 
organization take form and gain their truest 
significance. There is no subject fuller of 
meaning than this age-old subject of a man's 
relation to his fathers. Now that we have 
learned in these modern days to cast it into 
the form of this patriotism which I am trying 
briefly to describe, now that we have learned 
to see it in the moral and intellectual and relig- 
ious relation, we can look forward to the day 
when we shall learn to see in it no place for 
enmity, national or international. We may 
justly hope to look out upon that future day, 
when the patriots of every nation will find their 
greatest satisfaction in co-operating and com- 
bining toward the perfection of the great hu- 
manitarian ideal throughout the world. 

We dare not close our eyes in pessimism be- 
cause to-day we hear the thunder of guns and 
the cries of the wounded and the dying. Ter- 
rible as that is, terrible as the reason for it is, I 
beg you to believe that it is only an episode — a 
dismal, tragic episode, but an episode — in the 
forward march of an idea and a purpose which 
no armaments can permanently check. This 



82 PATRIOTISM 

is not a purposeless world. This is not a ball, 
plunging through space, with no orbit, subject 
to no law of control, existing as part of no sys- 
tem, serving no purpose. The physicist tells 
us that if we disturb in the very slightest degree 
any physical element in the universe, we affect 
its remotest circumference. What of the hu- 
man elements ? What of the importance and 
the balance which they have, the ideas, the 
feelings, and the acts of will which are the em- 
bodiments of ideas, that are carried forward 
into the making of institutions ? Those are the 
great things in history. We see them spring 
into life and enter one nation after another. 

There is a place for the Oriental; there is a 
place for the Occidental; there is a place for the 
European; there is a place for the American; 
just as there is a place in the great stout strand 
that binds the ship to the boat that tows it, 
for every one of the little threads that wound 
together make it what it is. Take that great 
strand apart and a child could snap each 
thread. Wind them tight together so that 
every one supports the other, and it would 
take a superman to tear that rope apart. 

This problem of institution building — whether 



PATRIOTISM 83 

by the people of one nation or by the peoples 
of all nations of the world together — is the one 
that will be supremely important when the 
curtain falls upon the tragedy that now moves 
its slow course to the pain and distress and 
grief of every patriot in every land. 



VI 
THE CHANGED OUTLOOK 



An Address delivered at the One Hundred and Forty- 
Seventh Annual Banquet of the Chamber of 
Commerce of the State of New York, 
November 18, 1915 



THE CHANGED OUTLOOK 

Four years ago I had the privilege of speak- 
ing in this presence. At that time I chose as 
my subject, "Business and Politics." We were 
then approaching the end of a presidential 
term and facing a national election; we were 
concerned, gravely concerned, with domestic 
problems, particularly with those manifold and 
important questions which arise out of the 
relations between government and business. 
To-night I have chosen as the topic on which 
to speak to you, quite informally and briefly, 
"The Changed Outlook"; for in the interval 
of those four years there has been a revolution 
in our thinking and a complete change in the 
prospect that opens out before us. Once again 
we are approaching the end of a presidential 
term and once again we are facing a national 
election, but the outlook to-day is strangely 
and solemnly different from what it was four 
years ago. 

It is not easy for one who lives in the midst 
of onrushing events to judge calmly and accu- 

87 



88 THE CHANGED OUTLOOK 

rately either of their significance or of their 
direction. The man who is borne helplessly 
down-stream by a roaring torrent has little 
opportunity to observe the foliage that may 
adorn the banks, or to determine with certainty 
whether he is to be dashed to pieces by the 
cataract of Niagara or borne harmlessly into 
the peaceful waters of a mountain lake. So it 
is with ourselves. The wild onrush of events 
in a world at war; the sudden and startling 
changes in finance, in commerce, in industry; 
the quick movement of armies and of navies 
by which some of the hopes and ambitions of 
two generations are gratified; the dazed per- 
plexity of the world's most trusted leaders — 
all these are characteristic* of the days through 
which we are living. 

When the midsummer sun set on the eve- 
ning of Friday, July 31, 1914, it set upon a 
world upon which it was never to rise again. 
Never again was that sun to rise upon the 
same world. As if by magic, transportation 
and communication stopped; the wells of credit 
were dried up; commerce and industry were 
brought to a standstill; men leaped to arms 
and to the assembling of the devilishly in- 



THE CHANGED OUTLOOK 89 

genious instruments of destruction; science 
which had been caring for the health, the com- 
fort, and the prosperity of man was instantly 
bent with amazing ingenuity and skill to the 
wholesale slaughter of human beings and to 
the destruction and waste of property on a 
scale unprecedented in all recorded history. 
This is neither the time nor the place to inquire 
why these strange and startling things took 
place. It is sufficient to observe that they did 
take place and that the whole world order was 
changed in a night. 

The peoples who are engaged in this titanic 
struggle are not untamed barbarians or wild 
Indians of the virgin forest. They are the 
best-trained and most highly educated peoples 
in the world. They have had every advantage 
that schools and universities can offer, and 
they have been associated for generations with 
literature and science and art and everything 
that is fine and splendid in what we call civili- 
zation. What we now know, even those of us 
who were most loath to believe it, is that under 
this thin veneer of civilization the elementary 
human passions of jealousy, envy, hatred, and 
malice were so lightly confined that at the 



go THE CHANGED OUTLOOK 

touch of a magic spring they burst forth to 
overwhelm everything that seems to make life 
worth living. Moreover, it is now so plain 
that even the dullest can see that the nations 
of Europe had been psychologically, politically, 
and even strategetically, at war for many years. 
In the guise of an armed peace they were really 
in conflict, and jealousy, suspicion, and in- 
trigue were abroad on every hand. Plans of 
instant mobilization and of quick attack were 
all in readiness, and the more ardent spirits 
were tugging hard at the bonds of convention- 
ality that restrained them from overt acts. 
Europe had been at war for years. What hap- 
pened on August I, 1914, was that the cur- 
tain was lifted so that all men might see; and 
the physical conflict of armies and navies fol- 
lowed as a final and dramatic incident in a 
contest which was on that day made evident, 
but which was not on that day begun. 

If I read history aright, only once before since 
the beginning of man's records has any similar 
catastrophe occurred in the Western world. 
With the downfall of the Roman Empire and 
the inrush of the barbarian hordes from the 
forests and plains of the North there was a 



THE CHANGED OUTLOOK 91 

wiping out of Greek and Roman civilization 
and of their evidences that was as complete as 
it was terrible. From that day to this there 
has been no similar cataclysm in Europe. 
There have been wars, many and severe. 
There have been revolutions devastating and 
terrible. There has been the spectacle of the 
great Napoleon defying the whole of Europe, 
but finally succumbing to the power of his ad- 
versaries. But not since the break-up of 
Roman civilization has the world seen anything 
that can compare with what is now going on 
before our eyes. Europe, Asia, Africa, and 
Australia are being tramped by contending 
armies or are held in the grip of the laws of 
war. 

It is idle to say, quite idle to say, that the 
American people are on the other side of the 
world and that these clashings and crashings 
are no concern of theirs. Ask the cotton 
grower in the South, or the copper miner in the 
far West, or the lumberman on Puget Sound, 
or the shipper in New York, in Baltimore, or 
New Orleans, or the banker in Wall Street, in 
State Street, or in La Salle Street, whether he 
knows that there is a war in Europe, and get 



9 2 THE CHANGED OUTLOOK 

his answer. Ask the student of international 
law, or the expounder of political ethics and 
the sanctity of treaties, or the devoted believer 
in civil liberty, whether the United States has 
any interest in this conflict, and get his answer ! 

It is no longer possible for the United States, 
ostrich-like, to plunge its head into the sands 
of a supposed isolation and to assume that its 
policies, its influences, and its ideals are not 
part of the wider world. The outlook has 
wholly changed. The future, and in particu- 
lar the immediate future, is charged with seri- 
ous international interest and with heavy in- 
ternational responsibility. Of this interest we 
cannot divest ourselves, and of this responsi- 
bility we dare not, without proving false to 
our trust as keepers of the faith in civil liberty 
as the highest political aim and object of 
mankind. 

There are reasons, good and sufficient and 
easily understood by the reader of history, why 
America's interest in international conditions 
is now much greater and much more important 
than ever before. In the history of peoples, it 
is a well-known fact that internal national de- 
velopment must precede international influence 



THE CHANGED OUTLOOK 93 

and direction. Not until a nation has unified 
itself, perfected reasonably well its instruments 
of government and become conscious of an 
ideal and of a mission which that ideal serves, 
can it be ready to take its place at the council 
table of nations and to exercise a shaping in- 
fluence in the formulation and carrying out 
of world policies. That time has now come in 
the history of the United States. We have ex- 
panded across the continent, and have settled 
and developed the waste places. We have es- 
tablished, after a long debate, arid by an 
epoch-making military struggle, the unity of 
the nation and the supremacy of the national 
ideal. We have developed great systems of 
transportation and manifold industries, and we 
have accumulated vast national wealth. We 
have made creditable contributions to science, 
to literature, and to the arts. The question 
now to press upon ourselves is, Are we ready 
and equipped to bear the responsibilities that 
the close of this war will place upon the Ameri- 
can people ? Are we prepared ? 

In one of the noblest orations of antiquity 
Pericles used these words in speaking to his 
fellow citizens of the Athenians who had died 



94 THE CHANGED OUTLOOK 

in the war with Sparta: "The whole earth is 
the sepulchre of famous men; and their glory 
is not graven only on stone over their native 
earth, but lives on far away, without visible 
symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's 
lives. For you it now remains to rival what 
they have done, and, knowing the secret of 
happiness to be freedom and the secret of free- 
dom to be a brave heart, squarely to face the 
war and all its perils." Surely these sonorous 
words sounding across the centuries seem al- 
most to have been meant for our ears to hear. 
We are to weave our lives, our aspirations, and 
our ideals into the stuff of other men's lives; 
we are to remember that the secret of happi- 
ness is freedom and that the secret of freedom 
is a brave heart, and then we are squarely to 
face this war and all that it brings in its train. 
There is much earnest speech among us in 
regard to national preparedness, and it is urged 
by many and influential voices that we must 
beware lest the calamity that fell so suddenly 
upon Europe should be forced against our wish 
or will upon us. Surely we must reckon with 
facts as they are, and not as we would wish 
them to be. We may turn our faces to the 



THE CHANGED OUTLOOK 95 

stars, but we must have a care to keep our feet 
on the firm ground. Nevertheless, there is a 
more serious and a more important aspect of 
national preparedness that has not yet been 
so much dwelt upon. Our chiefest task is to 
prepare our hearts and our minds to do our 
full duty as Americans to bind up the wounds 
of a stricken world and to lead the way to that 
new construction of the overturned political 
fabric which, if it is to endure, can rest upon 
no other principles than those of democracy, 
of freedom, of civil liberty, of international re- 
sponsibility and honor, to which we profess 
such earnest allegiance and through faith in 
which our nation has grown great. 

It is true of nations, as of men, that we are 
our brothers' keepers. Their interests are in- 
creasingly our interests, and our interests are 
increasingly theirs. We have no wish or will 
to interfere with problems that belong to 
Europe alone; but surely non-interference does 
not mean absence of interest in them or an 
absence of influence upon them or over them. 
In the Monroe Doctrine, in the policy of the 
Open Door, and in the wide-spread objection to 
Oriental immigration, we have given concrete 



96 TEE CHANGED OUTLOOK 

evidences of a developed and developing inter- 
national view-point and international policy. 
We must, by taking counsel together, by study 
and by reflection, prepare ourselves to say to 
a listening world what our international policy 
is and what it is to be; what influence we aim 
to exert and why, and what ideals we propose 
to hold aloft in the hope that they may guide 
and help other peoples. 

Before we can hope to influence others we 
must be sure of ourselves. We must without 
delay undertake the better conservation and 
organization of our own national resources of 
every kind. We must make it plain that, by 
voluntary effort and without sacrificing our 
traditional American principles to the demands 
of a bureaucratic organization, we too can effec- 
tively mobilize the industrial resources of a 
great nation. It is for American democracy to 
prove that it can secure the highest type of 
national preparedness and the highest type of 
national effectiveness without ceasing to be 
either American or democratic. In the recently 
established Trade Commission and in the Tariff 
Commission, whose quick establishment is so 
strongly supported, we shall have governmental 



TEE CHANGED OUTLOOK 97 

instrumentalities which might readily be made 
the centre for co-operative industrial effort and 
for the more complete equipment of this nation 
in respect to all the great basic industries. 
The problem of labor must be faced with 
courage, with frankness, and with sympathy; 
for industrial peace and satisfaction is as neces- 
sary a prerequisite of international peace and 
contentment as it is of national security and 
happiness. 

Moreover, it behooves us to cultivate a be- 
coming national modesty. It was Mr. Bryce 
who pointed out to us in the American Com- 
monwealth that the enormous force of public 
opinion is a danger, a danger to the people 
themselves as well as to their leaders, because 
it fills them with an undue confidence in their 
own wisdom, their own virtue, and their own 
freedom. In order to guard ourselves against 
the vice of self-complacency we must constantly 
re-examine and restate our moral and our 
political ideals, and we must not fail to give 
due weight to the moral and political ideals of 
other people. 

The world mission that we might have waited 
for through another centuiy has come to us 



9 8 THE CHANGED OUTLOOK 

to-day from the hand of fate. We can remain 
true to the injunction of Washington that we 
steer clear of permanent alliances with any 
portion of the foreign world, and yet do our 
full international duty; for what we should 
seek is not an alliance, entangling or otherwise, 
with any portion of the foreign world, but 
rather relations with the whole of that world 
and with every part of it, in order that in a 
spirit of friendship and good temper and con- 
structive statesmanship we may do our full 
share in raising that world to a higher plane. 

No one dares predict just what the end of this 
world war will be or when that end will come. 
It is possible, of course, that this cataclysm 
marks the end of centuries of progress, and it 
is possible that man in 1914 crossed over the 
watershed of civilization and is now to descend 
on the other side toward steadily growing bar- 
barism and the steadily extending rule of force. 
That I say is possible; but I for one am an un- 
conquerable optimist. I prefer to read history 
differently and to see in this appalling catastro- 
phe what the Greek called a katharsis, or cleans- 
ing of the spirit. I prefer to think of it as his- 
tory's way of teaching beyond peradventure or 



THE CHANGED OUTLOOK 99 

dispute the fallacy and the folly of the old 
ways and the old policies. Surely that strug- 
gle for the balance of power which the historian 
Stubbs described as the principle which gives 
unity to the plot of modern history — surely 
that struggle has proved its futility. Surely 
we can see the vanity of Ententes and Alliances 
and of a division of the world into heavily 
armed camps, each waiting for an opportunity 
or for an excuse to pounce upon the other. 

A democratic federated people can teach the 
world democracy and the use of the federative 
principle. A people devoted to civil liberty 
and to international honor, no less lightly held 
than the honor of an individual — that people 
can teach the world the foundations upon 
which to rebuild the shattered fabric of inter- 
national law and of broken treaties. 

The outlook before the people of the United 
States has changed. When Joseph Chamber- 
lain returned from South Africa his message to 
the people of Great Britain was: "You must 
learn to think imperially. " The message which 
any American alive to the world's situation to- 
day must bring to his fellow citizens is, you 
must learn to think internationally ! Domestic 



ioo TEE CHANGED OUTLOOK 

policies and problems are perhaps no less im- 
portant than they have been in the past, but 
by their side and for the immediate future sur- 
passing them in interest and in importance are 
the international problems and the international 
policies of the people of the United States. For 
those problems and for those policies we must 
prepare — prepare thoughtfully, seriously, speed- 
ily; for when the war shall be ended, we may 
truly say, as Gambetta said to the French 
people forty-five years ago: "Now that the 
danger is past, the difficulties begin." 



VII 
HIGHER PREPAREDNESS 



An Address delivered before the Union League of 
Philadelphia, November 27, 191 5 



HIGHER PREPAREDNESS 

It was my lot to be born after the Civil War 
had begun and for me the name, the face, and 
the repute of Abraham Lincoln belong not to 
memory but to imagination. Yet I was brought 
up under the very shadow of his name, of his 
fame, and of his work. The events and cir- 
cumstances of his life were among the earliest 
lessons that it was my fortune to learn. It 
seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, 
that Abraham Lincoln left to every American 
born after him a legacy in the form of a direct 
injunction to love his country, to study its 
needs, to make himself familiar with its poli- 
cies and its problems, and to labor with those 
like-minded with himself for the advancement 
of all of these. 

The era of Lincoln, of the Civil War, and of 
nation-building — that great classic era in the 
history of the western world and of all mankind 
— is closed. The problems that confronted the 
founders and the builders of our nation are still 
our problems, but they are presented to us in 
103 



104 HIGHER PREPAREDNESS 

a different form. We are no longer a young 
people, but a comparatively old and well- 
established one. We are, thank God, a united 
people. We have solved, let us hope forever 
and finally, the problem of building a single 
great nation out of a group of federated States 
with diverse populations, with conflicting eco- 
nomic needs and desires, and we have opened 
our arms to the whole wide world that it may 
enter in and share with us and with our children 
the shelter and the protection of this noble 
structure. When so much has been done we 
find ourselves confronted with the problems of 
an older people and of a better-established civ- 
ilization. It is no longer necessary for us to 
find men of energy and ambition to explore a 
continent, to bridge rivers, to fell forests, or to 
build railways across the desert; those are the 
problems of a new people, and we solved those 
problems in the generation that followed 1850 
and i860. Then came the problems incident 
to a more concentrated political and economic 
life — the problems of capital and labor, the 
problems of the growth of great corporate 
wealth, of the organization of business and of 
the development of public utilities, as well as 



HIGHER PREPAREDNESS 105 

the relation of all these to government, both 
State and national. During all this second 
period, which was shorter than the first, very 
intense and tremendously important, abound- 
ing in problems that touched the interests and 
convictions of every citizen, we were still a self- 
centred people. We had foreign relations, but 
they were of minor importance. They occupied 
the attention of the President, of the Depart- 
ment of State, and of the Senate, but beyond 
that they hardly existed for the great mass of 
our American population. But now, in a 
twinkling of an eye, the outlook that confronts 
America has changed and we are about to 
enter, perhaps it would be correct to say we 
have already entered, upon a new and third 
period of our political development and of our 
intellectual and moral preoccupation. We are 
now confronted with the fact, borne in upon 
us in a thousand ways, that steam, electricity, 
the use of the air, the development of modern 
industry and finance, have conspired to destroy 
distance and to eliminate time, and that these 
have bound the whole world together in a new 
and hitherto unsuspected sort of interdepen- 
dence. Out of that interdependence of the 



106 HIGHER PREPAREDNESS 

nations an interdependence of our nation with 
other nations of the world, comes the new 
series of problems for the consideration and 
the solution of which this nation must insis- 
tently and thoughtfully prepare. 

The old world order changed when this war- 
storm broke. The old international order 
passed away as suddenly, as unexpectedly, 
and as completely as if it had been wiped out 
by a gigantic flood, by a great tempest, or by 
a volcanic eruption. The old world order died 
with the setting of that day's sun and a new 
world order is being born while I speak, with 
birth-pangs so terrible that it seems almost in- 
credible that life could come out of such fear- 
ful suffering and such overwhelming sorrow. 

What has America to do with it all ? All 
these terrible clashings and crashings are on 
the other side of the world, from which we are 
separated by a great ocean. How do these 
matters affect us, secure in our protection 
across three thousand miles of sea, living under 
other political institutions and under the domi- 
nance of other political ideas and with different 
economic and social interests ? To make an- 
swer to these questions our hearts guide our 



HIGHER PREPAREDNESS 107 

heads. We first feel, and then we see, the 
community of our interest with those peoples 
in Europe who are struggling against aggression 
for the maintenance of their own national life, 
their own undisturbed territory, and their own 
free institutions. The world cannot be cut in 
two any longer by an ocean or a mountain 
range. The several peoples of the earth are 
fellows and comrades and they cannot, if they 
would, isolate themselves completely from each 
other. 

In this new outlook that confronts us we are 
not called upon, as I see it, to depart in princi- 
ple or in practice from sound American policy, 
but we are called upon to consider whether new 
occasions do not teach new duties and whether 
new problems do not bring new opportunities 
and new obligations. I would not have the 
people of these United States forget the injunc- 
tion of Washington. I would not have them 
depart from the path of established policy that 
has been trodden so long and on the whole so 
wisely. I would not have them make an alli- 
ance, entangling or otherwise, with any single 
nation or any group of nations on the globe. 
But I would have them enter into such rela- 



108 HIGHER PREPAREDNESS 

tions of intimacy and influence with every na- 
tion that the spirit and convictions which ani- 
mate and permeate the American people might 
be made a contribution to the world's civiliza- 
tion when this war ends. I would endeavor to 
show to Europe how here across the sea we 
have solved and are solving some problems that 
are in kind their problems. I would try to 
show to Europe that whatever may be the diffi- 
culties and the conflicts which grow out of dif- 
ferences of race and of creed and of language, 
those difficulties are only increased by political 
repression, while they are decreased by an ex- 
tension of civil and political liberty. I would 
try to show that on the whole, and despite the 
dangers and difficulties and the many and 
obvious embarrassments which accompany it, 
a national policy of freedom, of hospitality, and 
of equal opportunity solves more problems than 
it leaves unsolved, and that on the whole it 
solves more political problems than any other 
alternative policy that has yet been presented 
for the government of men. I would not inter- 
fere for a moment with the internal concerns of 
any European nation or with their just ambi- 
tions, their alliances, and their rivalries, but at 



HIGHER PREPAREDNESS 109 

a time like this I would not throw away the 
lesson of a hundred and twenty-five years of 
life and government under the Constitution of 
the United States. I would make a world fig- 
ure of Washington. I would make world fig- 
ures of Hamilton and Jefferson, of Marshall 
and Webster. I would make a world figure of 
Abraham Lincoln. I would make their names, 
their faces, their public acts, and the great ten- 
dencies and institutions that they organized and 
represented the property of the whole civilized 
world for the benefit of all mankind. For this 
or for any such policy of international influence 
this nation must prepare. 

We have been speaking much of late of pre- 
paredness, and properly so; but there is an 
aspect of this important question that has 
hardly been touched upon, and as to which 
the public mind is as yet almost completely 
uninformed. That question is this: What is to 
be the object of your preparedness ? What are 
to be the policies that you are going to teach, 
to defend, and to extend over the earth ? 
What are to be the ideals that you are going 
to hold up before yourselves and then before 
the other nations of the earth ? Armies and 



no HIGHER PREPAREDNESS 

navies are not ends; they are means. But 
means to what end ? For what are we going 
to prepare ? Are we going to prepare to make 
this nation first a model nation at home and 
then a model nation abroad ? If we are going 
to do this, then we have a policy. If we are 
not going to do this, then we have no policy 
but only a proposal for expenditure. 

Our American ideals are not vague or un- 
certain. They have been stated for us in lan- 
guage that the whole world can read, in words 
that will remain forever familiar where the 
history of freedom is read and studied. They 
have been written for us particularly in four 
great historic documents. You will find them 
in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of 
Independence. You will find them in the pre- 
amble to the Constitution of the United States. 
You will find them in Washington's farewell 
address to the American people. You will find 
them put with all the terseness of classic litera- 
ture in the immortal address of Abraham Lin- 
coln on the battle-field of Gettysburg. Those 
great documents have stated for us the aims, 
the ideals, and the purposes of this government, 
as well as the aims, the ideals, and the purposes 



HIGHER PREPAREDNESS in 

of the people in founding and in maintaining 
this government. It is for a fuller comprehen- 
sion of those aims, those ideals, and those pur- 
poses, for a more complete carrying out of 
them at home, and for a more effective teach- 
ing of them abroad that we must prepare. We 
must prepare under the leadership of those who 
by experience, by training, by discipline, and by 
conviction are able to help us set our feet in 
these new paths. For it is as true to-day as it 
was when the prophet first said it, that where 
there is no vision the people perish. 

The time has come when the American people 
must learn to think internationally. We must 
learn to think in terms of our relations with the 
whole world, and we must learn to think of 
other peoples than ourselves with such sym- 
pathy, with such kindliness, and with such un- 
derstanding as will enable us to appreciate the 
point of view, the opinions, and the institutions 
of those whose experiences have been different 
from our own. I like to think that the hand 
of fate has brought to us out of this terrible 
war a new and unexpected call to achievement; 
first at home in putting our own house in order, 
and next abroad in teaching the peoples of the 



ii2 HIGHER PREPAREDNESS 

world a lesson that the founders and the fathers 
have taught us. In all this, however, we must 
walk circumspectly and without either pride 
or arrogance. We ourselves have still too 
much to learn to justify us in attempting the 
task of imposing, single-handed, new ideals 
upon the world. We can, however, and we 
should participate, with the open-minded and 
broad-minded of every land in the perpetual 
and persistent re-examination of our own prin- 
ciples, our own aims, our own purposes, and 
by conferring and consulting together as to 
how best we can advance this nation and every 
nation in paths of justice and of liberty. 

We have great economic problems that are 
in part internal and that are in part interna- 
tional. There are signs that this new inter- 
national era of which I speak is going to help 
us to solve some of our internal economic prob- 
lems. 

We have got to face under these new condi- 
tions the world-old problem of how to provide 
justly for equal opportunity, and how to pro- 
vide an economic basis for individual existence 
in order that men may be able to live at all. 
It is hardly worth while to preach ideals of 



HIGHER PREPAREDNESS 113 

government to a starving man. We must pro- 
vide, first, wisely, justly, and securely for our 
internal economic organization, in order that 
we may be able to do these new international 
deeds of which I speak. In other words, while 
our whole problem, national and international, 
is bound up together, it becomes immensely 
larger and immensely more important than it 
has ever been before, because we have now 
discovered these innumerable points of con- 
tact with other nations and we see the meaning 
and significance on one side of the world of 
some public act or economic policy that has its 
origin on the other. This is all a part of the 
task that I call learning to think internation- 
ally. It will affect our domestic problems and 
our domestic policies, as well as our foreign 
problems and our foreign policies. 

Unless I mistake the signs of the times, this 
nation is crying out for leadership. It is cry- 
ing out for a voice that will give expression to 
its political conviction and to its moral purpose 
in tones that every American will understand. 
Unless I mistake the signs of the times, the 
American people would like a leadership whose 
ear is not continually fastened to the ground. 



ii4 HIGHER PREPAREDNESS 

We wish, we need, we long for a determined, 
clear, and sympathetic voice that will do for 
our day and generation what Abraham Lincoln 
did for his. A voice that will look down into 
the hearts of the plain people, that will know 
the conditions that influence their lives, that 
will understand the motives that guide their 
action, that will sympathize with their ambi- 
tions, with their difficulties, and with their fail- 
ures, and that will call them up to the high 
places of the earth as did those voices that 
called our fathers up to their great achievement. 
Give us leadership. Give us a mind to seek, 
a heart to feel, and a voice to proclaim what 
the American people of this day and this gen- 
eration aspire to do at home and abroad. 



VIII 
THE BUILDING OF THE NATION 



An Address delivered at the Annual Luncheon of the 

Associated Press at the Waldorf-Astoria, New York, 

April 25, 1916 



THE BUILDING OF THE NATION 

If any significance be attached to what I 
shall briefly say in your presence, it can only 
be because it represents the attempt of one 
American who feels keenly the responsibility 
of his country and of its entire citizenship at 
this moment when the world stands at a cross- 
roads in its path of progress. If we stand at 
that crossroads irresolute, paralyzed of word 
and will, history will have one story to tell. If 
we turn to the right and take the path that 
leads upward to new achievement and to last- 
ing honor, it will have a very different story to 
tell. If we should turn to the left and follow 
the winding and rocky road that leads down 
to a darkening gloom — we know not where — 
history will have yet another record to make 
of the American people and of their capacity 
to represent civilization. 

It is just about twenty years ago since 

George Meredith, writing to the London Daily 

News, said that since the benignant outcome 

of the greatest of civil wars he had come to 

117 



n8 THE BUILDING OF THE NATION 

look upon the American people as the leaders 
in civilization. That is a proud and ennobling 
judgment, and we may well search our minds 
and our hearts to ascertain whether it be true, 
and whether we are competent for the high 
honor that so distinguished an observer of his 
kind proffered to us as his personal judgment. 

The question which I ask in your presence 
this afternoon is this: Have we an American 
nation ? If so, is that nation conscious of a 
unity of purpose and of ideals ? If so, what is 
to be the policy of that nation in the immediate 
future ? 

Familiar as nations seem to us, they have 
not always existed in their present form. The 
new consciousness of unity that makes a nation 
is in part the outgrowth of unity of race origin, 
in part the outgrowth of unity of language, in 
part the outgrowth of unity of institutional 
life, in part the outgrowth of unity of military 
and religious tradition. It seized hold of the 
minds of men in most practical fashion. The 
result is that from the time of the death of 
Charlemagne to the time of the present Ger- 
man Emperor the history of the world is the 
history of nation-building and of the by-prod- 



THE BUILDING OF THE NATION 119 

ucts of nation-building. Nation-building has 
proceeded usually by seeking out natural bound- 
aries in order to gain the protection of lofty 
mountains, or of broad rivers, or of the sea it- 
self. One war after another is to be explained 
in terms of a nation's definite purpose to pos- 
sess itself of a geographic unity as its home. 
There has been by no means equal care taken 
by the nations to establish and to protect an 
ethnic unity. A strong people has usually felt 
confident that it could hold an alien element in 
subjection and yet preserve national integrity 
and unity of spirit. So one after another of 
the greater nations of the world has, in seeking 
for geographic unity, insisted on incorporating 
in its own body politic alien and often discor- 
dant elements and holding them in stern sub- 
jection. The examples are too familiar to be 
recited here. 

This process of nation-building has gone on 
until the nation has come to be conceived as 
an end in itself, as superior to law, to the con- 
ventions of morality, and to the precepts of 
religion. A form of patriotism has been devel- 
oped all over the world which finds in the na- 
tion itself the highest human end. The logical 



120 TEE BUILDING OF THE NATION 

result, and indeed the almost necessary result, 
of this type of thinking is the war which is 
now creeping over the world's civilization and 
destroying it with the sure pitilessness of an 
Alpine glacier. 

This war is the nemesis of nation-building 
conceived as an end in itself. Unless a nation, 
like an individual, have some purpose, some 
ideal, some motive which lies outside of and 
beyond self-interest and self-aggrandizement, 
war must continue on the face of this earth 
until the day when the last and strongest man, 
superb in his mighty loneliness, shall look out 
from a rock in the Caribbean upon a world 
that has been depopulated in its pursuit of a 
false ideal, and be left to die alone with none 
to mourn or to bury him. 

In the history of nations the story of our 
America has a place that is all its own. The 
American nation came into being in response 
to a clear and definite purpose. A theory of 
human life and of human government was con- 
ceived and put into execution on a remote and 
inaccessible part of the earth's surface. The 
moving cause of the American nation was the 
aspiration for civil and political liberty and for 



THE BUILDING OF THE NATION 121 

individual freedom which was already stirring 
in the minds of western Europe in the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries. This aspiration 
gained in force as the art of printing multiplied 
books, and as the periodical press came into 
existence. The high-minded, the courageous, 
the venturesome were drawn across the wide 
ocean toward the west, carrying with them for 
the most part the liberal ideas and the advanced 
thought that were steadily increasing their 
hold upon the people of western Europe. Great 
Britain, Holland, France, were responding in 
steadily increasing measure to the same ideals 
that led the Puritan to Massachusetts Bay and 
the Cavalier to Virginia. 

On this Atlantic shore distances were great 
and communication difficult. In addition there 
were social, economic, and religious differences 
that kept the struggling colonists apart. The 
result was that there grew up here not a na- 
tion, but the material out of which a nation 
could be made. There is a sense, a deep and 
striking sense, in which the same remains abso- 
lutely true to-day. There is not yet a nation, 
but the rich and fine materials out of which a 
true nation can be made by the architect with 



122 THE BUILDING OF THE NATION 

vision to plan and by the builder with skill 
adequate to execute. 

When a common oppression forced the sep- 
arate colonists together they still sadly lacked 
that devotion to a unity higher than any of 
its component parts which would have saved 
so much loss and so much suffering during the 
days of revolution and of the first steps toward 
a National Government. An enormous step 
forward was taken when the National Govern- 
ment was built. In the adoption of the Con- 
stitution of the United States, the corner-stone 
was laid for one of the most splendid structures 
in all the history of nations. Then quickly fol- 
lowed sharp political divergence. There were 
those who would lay stress upon the new na- 
tional unity; there were still more who thought 
it important to emphasize the separate ele- 
ments out of which that unity had been com- 
posed. The judicial logic of Marshall and the 
convincing eloquence of Webster were the chief 
unifying and nation-building forces in the gen- 
eration that followed. Meanwhile sharp dif- 
ferences of economic interest were manifesting 
themselves, and the fatal question of slavery 
pressed forward both as an economic and as a 



THE BUILDING OF THE NATION 123 

political issue. The new nation, which had al- 
ready made such progress upon the foundations 
laid by the fathers, fell apart, and only after 
one of the most terrible and destructive of civil 
wars were the ruins of the disaster cleared away 
and the ground prepared for the next step in 
construction. Here again mistakes were made 
so numerous and so severe that the unifying 
and nation-building process was checked and 
held back for many years. 

Then two new sets of separating and disin- 
tegrating forces began to make themselves 
strongly felt. First, the economic differences 
which must of necessity manifest themselves 
over so large and so diverse a territory now re- 
vealed themselves with new force — in part as 
a result of the industrial revolution and in part 
as a result of purely American conditions — as 
involving a class conflict between capital and 
labor. Soon there were signs that citizenship, 
with its compelling allegiance to the common 
weal, was to be subordinated in discouraging 
fashion, not once but often, to the immediate 
interests and policies of an economic class. 

Second, the immigration from other coun- 
tries, which had been for a long time substan- 



124 THE BUILDING OF THE NATION 

tially homogeneous became increasingly and 
rapidly heterogeneous. New nationalities, new 
languages, new racial affinities were drawn upon 
for the recruitment of the population of the 
United States. The hopes and the ambitions 
which one hundred and two hundred years 
before had been the peculiar property of the 
people of Western Europe had now spread far 
away to the East and to the South. With this 
heterogeneous immigration there came, in no 
inconsiderable measure, the echo of the Old 
World animosities and feuds and hates. These 
did not manifest themselves in any direct sense 
as anti-American, but they did manifest them- 
selves with sufficient strength to deprive Amer- 
ica of a unity of attitude, of feeling, and of 
policy in dealing with the international rela- 
tions which every day grow in importance and 
in significance. 

So it is that at this moment, with a world 
war raging about us, with years full of fate 
stretched out for us to walk in, we are not sure 
of our national unity of thought and feeling 
and purpose because of the presence of disin- 
tegrating elements and forces which weaken 
our sense of unity at home and which deprive 



TEE BUILDING OF TEE NATION 125 

us of the influence abroad which attaches to 
unity at home. The grave problem before the 
American people to-day is that of completing 
the process of nation-building. It is the prob- 
lem of setting our house in order. It is the 
problem of integrating America. It is the 
problem of subordinating every personal ambi- 
tion, every class interest and policy, every race 
attachment, to the one dominant idea of an 
America free, just, powerful, forward-facing, 
that shall stand out in the history of nations as 
the name of a people who conceive their mission 
and their true greatness to lie in service to 
mankind. We are the inheritors of a great 
tradition. What poets and philosophers have 
dreamed, that we are trying day by day to do. 
Our stumblings, our blunders, our shortcom- 
ings are many; but if we keep our hearts clean 
and our heads clear he who a thousand years 
from now writes the history of liberty and jus- 
tice and happiness among men will be able to 
tell to those far-ofF generations a proud story of 
the rise and influence of the American nation. 
We find here everything which is needed for 
a great nation. The task before us to-day is 
to make it. The task before the American 



126 THE BUILDING OF THE NATION 

people is nothing more or less than a speedy 
continuation, and, if it be practicable, the 
completion of the process of nation-building. 
It is the problem of the integration of America 
about those great fundamental principles and 
purposes which the very name America itself 
brings to our minds and which this flag stirs to 
expression on every lip. 

We know in our heart what America means. 
The problem is to teach it to our fellows; to 
share with them an understanding and an 
appreciation of it; to unite with them in an 
expression of it. We wish to build a nation 
fit to serve; a nation that does not find its end 
in its own aggrandizement, however great that 
be; a nation that cannot find its purpose com- 
plete in amassing all the wealth of Golconda, 
but that can only achieve its aim by carrying 
a message to mankind of what has been found 
possible on this continent. Saxon and Celt, 
Teuton and Slav, Latin and Hun, all are here 
not as aliens but as citizens; not as immigrants 
but as members of a body politic which is new 
in conception in human history, as it is new in 
its own thought of its high purpose. Can 
America integrate itself at this crisis; can it 



THE BUILDING OF THE NATION 127 

show that here is a nation which, out of vari- 
ous and varied ethnic elements, can be brought 
into a genuine unity by devotion to high prin- 
ciple and by moral purpose before the face of 
all mankind ? Can we make an America that 
shall go down the corridors of time with a 
proud place on the pages of history ? 

We must remember that the greatest em- 
pires have fallen as well as risen. We must 
remember that the most powerful dynasties 
have passed away as well as come into exist- 
ence. There is no reason to suppose that our 
America is going to escape the everlasting law 
of change. We know its history and its origin. 
We have seen its rise. We know its present 
state. Who can predict how many hundreds 
or thousands of years it will take before the 
forests will be felled and the streams will be 
dried, and this great fertile continent of ours, 
like the plains of ancient Iran, where civiliza- 
tion began, will become a desert, fit only for 
the exploring parties of the archaeologist ? 
When that time comes, what do we want to 
have written on the pages of history of those 
who lived for hundreds or perhaps thousands 
of years on this continent ? What do we want 



128 THE BUILDING OF THE NATION 

to have said about the way in which America 
met the greatest crisis of the world's so-called 
modern history in 1916 ? Do we wish a nation 
weak, broken to pieces, irresolute, filled with 
conflicting and discordant voices, or do we 
wish a nation unified, strong, sympathetic, and 
ready to respond to the cause of a common 
purpose to serve all humanity, even though 
the rest of humanity be at war with itself ? 

The year 1916 is but one member of an infi- 
nite series. Countless eons have gone before 
it and countless eons will come after it. The 
physical forces of nature will go their way 
through indefinite time, performing their al- 
lotted functions, obeying their peculiar laws, 
and undergoing those manifold changes and 
transmutations which make up the heavens and 
the earth. Not so with the reputation and the 
influence of a nation. Opportunity will not 
knock forever at any door. It is knocking 
now at the door of the American people. If 
they are able to rise to an appreciation of their 
own part in the world, of their own controlling 
principles and policies; if they are able to put 
aside every self-seeking, every distracting, every 
brutal appeal, then no one can tell what light 



THE BUILDING OF THE NATION 129 

may illumine the page on which the history of 
our nation will yet be written. 

It is nearly sixty years since Abraham Lin- 
coln in his debates with Senator Douglas made 
much use of the Scriptural saying that "a 
house divided against itself cannot stand"; 
and he added, "I do not expect the house will 
fall, but I do expect the house will cease to be 
divided." So I say to-day to this influential 
company of Americans, we do expect, every 
one of us, that our house will cease to be 
divided. We do expect that our America will 
come to full consciousness of its purpose; that 
the serene courage of Washington, the con- 
structive genius of Hamilton, the keen human 
insight and sympathy of Jefferson, the patient 
wisdom of Lincoln, will not have been in vain 
in teaching us what our country is and may 
become. Shall we catch sight of that some- 
thing higher than selfishness, higher than ma- 
terial gain, higher than the triumph of brute 
force, which alone can lead a nation up to 
those high places that become sacred in his- 
tory, and from which influence descends in a 
mighty torrent, to refresh, to vivify, and to 
inspire all mankind ? 



130 THE BUILDING OF THE NATION 

It is as true to-day as it was in ancient times 
that where there is no vision the people perish. 
We can make an America with a vision. We 
cannot make it without. 



IX 

NATIONALITY AND BEYOND 



An Address delivered before the Commercial Club, San 
Francisco, Cal., August 8, 1916 



NATIONALITY AND BEYOND 

It is no small satisfaction to be able to stand 
for a few moments this afternoon in the pres- 
ence of this great company of busy men, in 
order to discuss with them, however im- 
perfectly, a matter which ought to be upper- 
most in the minds of every one of us. 

Some weeks ago I was surprised and shocked 
to read in the public press the statement, 
attributed to a person of high importance, that 
with the causes and the outcome of the Euro- 
pean War we Americans were not concerned. 
I am bound to assume that the words must 
have been used in some strange and unusual 
manner, for I find myself unable to believe that 
any intelligent American, in high station or in 
low, could hold the view which these words, 
interpreted literally, would appear to express. 
I should as soon expect one to say that we 
Americans were not interested in the revival of 
learning, or in the causes or outcome of the 
French Revolution, or in the invention of print- 
ing, or in the harnessing of science to industry, 

133 



134 NATIONALITY AND BEYOND 

or in any one of the great, significant events 
in the history of free men. For unless I am 
wholly mistaken in the significance of these 
years through which we are passing, we are 
living in one of the great epoch-marking crises 
of the history of the world. We are standing 
at one of the watersheds from the heights of 
which streams of tendency and of influence 
will flow for generations, perhaps for centuries 
to come, now this way and now that. 

What we are witnessing is not an ordinary 
international war. We are not spectators of a 
contest between Guatemala and Honduras over 
a boundary; we are standing before a struggle 
so stupendous, involving such incalculable sums 
of human treasure that all the great contests 
with which history is strewn fade into insignifi- 
cance before it. This contest is not between 
savage and barbarous and untutored and back- 
ward peoples. It is not a strong barbarian who 
is emerging from the jungle to extend his reach 
over the less powerful. This war is a clash 
between ideals. It is a controversy over ideals 
and national purposes, and it takes rank with 
the most magnificent events in all history; and 
I use the word magnificent in its literal sense 



NATIONALITY AND BEYOND 135 

of great-making, a great making-over of issues 
and tendencies. 

What we are witnessing is the end of the 
old notions of Nationality. We are standing 
at the bloody grave of an ideal that is a 
thousand years old, one that has made the 
history of Europe since the fall of the Roman 
Empire. And we are witnessing the birth of 
a new ideal, an ideal of Nationality with new 
human significance, new human service, and 
new human helpfulness — an ideal of Nation- 
ality higher than mere self-aggrandizement, or 
economic wealth, or military power. This is 
an ideal which calls to the heart and to the 
mind of every American, and stirs his soul with 
the hope and the desire that his nation may 
participate in the upbuilding of a new concep- 
tion of national purpose that shall call upon 
us to see something in a nation that is beyond 
population and wealth and trade and influence, 
and that, whether the nation be great or 
whether it be small, shall give it an honorable 
place in the great structure which is civiliza- 
tion. 

Just so long as every nation is regarded as 
an end in itself, just so long will the world be 



136 NATIONALITY AND BEYOND 

faced with the possibility of a recurrence of 
this soul-stirring tragedy. Just so long will the 
time come, at more or less frequent intervals, 
when national ambition, national zeal, national 
selfishness even, will find themselves struggling 
for new and forceful expression, for new and 
greater extension of influence, for new accom- 
plishment and new grandeur. 

I take it. that the dream of one world-empire 
has passed away forever. It was a dream that 
came to the ancient Persians; it was a dream 
that sent Alexander the Great with his troops 
out over the deserts of Asia; it was a dream 
that stirred the Roman conquerors; it was a 
dream that gave Charlemagne his name; it was 
a dream that showed us the magnificent spec- 
tacle of Napoleon trying to turn back the hands 
of the clock of progress only a century ago. 
That dream, I take it, has passed forever, and 
we have now to deal not with the conception 
of a world-empire, but with the conception of 
clashing, conflicting, mutually antagonistic na- 
tionalities. International war at intervals is 
the necessary accompaniment of that stage of 
national politics. But magnificent as was the 
diplomacy and the statecraft of those who 



NATIONALITY AND BEYOND 137 

builded the present nations of Europe, that 
statecraft and the ideal of nationality which it 
pursued, have passed away forever. We are 
now coming to that state of international policy 
where, whether a nation be democratic or 
monarchical, informed public opinion matters 
mightily, and little by little is becoming the 
responsible controller of policy. An instructed 
and conscientious public opinion is reaching 
out to take the control of intefnational policy 
out of the hands of monarchs and their irre- 
sponsible ministers, and to put that control in 
the hands of representative ministers of gov- 
ernment who are responsible to their several 
peoples and who will no longer wage wars for 
personal, dynastic, or merely individual aims. 
As that democratizing of international relations, 
of foreign policy, takes place, the ground will 
be ploughed and harrowed and seeded and 
prepared for the crop of a new ideal. This is 
the ideal of a great community of nations each 
standing, as international law says it shall 
stand, as the equal of every other, whether 
great or small, powerful or weak, engaged in 
the common co-operative task of advancing the 
world's civilization, of extending its commerce 



138 NATIONALITY AND BEYOND 

and trade, of developing its science, its art, 
and its literature; all aiming to increase the 
standards of comfort, and to lift the whole 
great mass of mankind to new and higher 
planes of existence, of occupation, and of en- 
joyment. In that co-operative family of na- 
tions whose institutions are now in the making, 
there will be a place for every people, for every 
race, and for every language, and there will be 
a place for us. The compact of the Pilgrim 
Fathers on the Mayflower, the Declaration of 
Independence, the Constitution, the Gettys- 
burg Address, and Lincoln's Second Inaugural 
are all one great series of steps in the develop- 
ment of our national purpose and of our inter- 
national position and influence. 

We are constantly reminded that George 
Washington counselled this nation to beware of 
entangling alliances that would carry us into 
the martial conflicts of Europe. We have 
wisely maintained that policy from his day 
to our own; but nothing was further from 
his thought than to counsel us against partici- 
pation with every other nation in the solution 
of the great political problems common to all 
nations. We know, because their very names 



NATIONALITY AND BEYOND 139 

recall the knowledge to our minds, what the 
great nations of the ancient world and of mod- 
ern times meant and still mean. We know 
what Italy means, what Germany means, what 
France means, what Holland means, what 
Great Britain means. We see with the eye of 
imagination their accomplishments, their ser- 
vice, and their great leaders of human influence 
and of action for centuries past. The question 
that now presses heavily upon our American 
people is, What shall we make America to be ? 
Shall America come to be merely the symbol 
for a busy hive of industrious bees, or a sym- 
bol for a great hill of intelligent ants ? Shall it 
mean only a nation absorbed in daily toil, in 
accumulation, in individual satisfaction, or 
shall it mean a nation so intelligent as to its 
purposes, so secure in its grasp upon its ideals 
and so devoted to them, that it will not rest 
until it has carried all round this world an 
American message that will raise and help and 
succor the stricken and conflicting family of 
peoples ? Shall we keep to ourselves the great 
fundamental American accomplishments that 
have in them lessons for the whole world, or 
shall we use our influence to teach to others 



140 NATIONALITY AND BEYOND 

those accomplishments and to spread them 
abroad ? 

I mean, first, our literally stupendous achieve- 
ment in federation. We have shown for the 
first time in history on a large scale that there 
may be flexibility in government combined 
with a single unit of ultimate control. We have 
shown how we can retain personal liberty and 
local self-government while building up a 
strong, powerful, united nation. Believe me, 
the world outside of the United States is wait- 
ing to profit by that experience. If there can 
be a common unity between Maine and Cali- 
fornia, Washington and Florida, uniting local 
self-government with membership in a great 
federated nation, why is not some part of that 
principle and why is not some part of that 
experience to be made ready for use and appli- 
cation by Great Britain, and Italy, and France, 
and Hungary, and Russia, and the rest ? 

Then, so many human conflicts arise out of 
differences of language, differences of religion, 
differences of institutional life, and so often 
the attempt has been made to suppress and to 
oppress the weak by the stronger. Men and 
women are told that they may not worship 



NATIONALITY AND BEYOND 141 

according to their faith; that their children 
may not be educated in schools where the ver- 
nacular is taught; and that there must be vari- 
ous differences between races and creeds and 
languages and types. Have we not proved to 
a watching world that the cure for that form 
of conflict is Liberty ? Have we not shown 
that freedom of religion, freedom of education, 
equality of race and of language, letting all 
work out their several conflicts and controver- 
sies as they please subject only to the law, is 
the best policy ? Have we not shown that out 
of these different elements, a strong, united 
nation can be built ? And are we not ready 
and anxious to teach that to those who would 
still try to unify by suppression and by perse- 
cution ? 

Are we not ready as Americans first to set 
in order our own house, first to make sure that 
we ourselves are living at home in accordance 
with our ideals, with our best purposes, and are 
learning the lessons of our own experience ? 
And then, shall we not be ready to say to 
Europe, to Asia, and to Africa, and to our 
sister republics to the South, that we feel our 
sense of international obligation ? We have 



142 NATIONALITY AND BEYOND 

gained some information; we have proved some 
things. This information and this experience 
we offer them. We offer it in persuasiveness, 
in friendship, and in kindness. We offer this 
as our contribution to the great temple of civ- 
ilization that we all would join to build. 

What a day it will be, my fellow Americans, 
when we can take our Washington, our Jeffer- 
son, our Hamilton, our Marshall, our Webster, 
and our Lincoln out of the restricted class of 
merely American voices and American figures 
and American heroes, and give them to the 
world, to take their first place by the side of 
the great statesmen, the great artists, the great 
poets, the great seers of all time, as our contri- 
bution to a new civilization in which every 
nation shall find its place ! Understanding this, 
let us press forward to a single goal for all men, 
the goal described and written in our own 
American Declaration of Independence. 

That is the goal that lies beyond Nationality 
conceived as an end in itself. 



X 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 



An Address delivered at a General Assembly of Columbia 
University, February 6, 1917 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

There have been solemn and impressive mo- 
ments in the life of this University, and there is 
a solemn and impressive moment now. 

When the farmers at Concord Bridge fired 
"the shot heard round the world, " the men of 
old King's College offered their services and 
their lives to the cause of national indepen- 
dence, and Hamilton, Jay, and Livingston went 
out of that little college to lay the foundations 
of a nation. In 1861, when Abraham Lincoln, 
patient, long-suffering, devoted to humanity, 
issued his call for 75,000 volunteers to repel the 
attack upon the integrity of the United States 
that was made in the firing on Sumter, the 
halls of Columbia College were almost vacant 
because of the company of students of that 
day who, with scores of the younger alumni, 
turned their faces toward the light. We are 
now facing a crisis in the history of our nation 
and in the history of mankind which will take 
its place by the side of the great crises that 
those who came before us met and faced, and 

145 



146 THE PRESENT CRISIS 

so gave this ancient college a reputation for 
public service and for patriotic devotion that 
justifies the splendid inscription on yonder 
Library that it exists "for the advancement of 
the public good." 

The President of the United States, in formal 
statement to the Congress, and through the 
Congress to a listening world, has said that he 
deemed it his duty to suspend diplomatic rela- 
tions with the government of a great people to 
whom we have long been bound by many and 
close personal and intellectual relationships, 
and to say that if there be an overt attack in 
violation of public law upon an American right 
he will have to ask the Congress for full author- 
ity to protect and to defend those rights by 
whatever means may be found necessary. I 
feel that I may with perfect confidence promise 
to the President of the United States the unani- 
mous support of Columbia University in that 
great duty. 

This is no light enterprise which we contem- 
plate. Our people are sincerely devoted to 
peace and would wish to walk in its happy and 
fruitful paths with all their neighbors. But 
there is something that they value more — and 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 147 

that is liberty, justice, righteousness, and obe- 
dience to public law. Upon those foundations 
rest everything we are, everything we have 
been, everything we hope to become, and every 
service that we can render to mankind. Upon 
those foundations rests the hope of the very 
people who are now so madly warring against 
them. In defending those great principles of 
public order we are serving not the cause of 
America alone, not alone the cause of those 
who have so long and so valiantly carried on 
the struggle on the battle-fields of this war, but 
we are really serving the cause of those who, 
for the moment, are blinded to the significance 
of what they do. 

Let no one say that if the President asks us 
for service he is dragging us into a European 
war and into conflicts as to national ambition 
and national policy that are no concern of ours. 
Nothing could be further from the fact. There 
was no European war after the fateful hour 
on the morning of August 4, 1914, when enemy 
troops crossed the line of unoffending, innocent, 
peace-loving Belgium. At that moment this 
contest was lifted out of the area of a mili- 
tary struggle between dynasties and com- 



148 TEE PRESENT CRISIS 

mercial systems and ideas of government, and 
became a great epoch-marking world struggle 
as to whether public law and public right were 
or were not to be held superior to military 
necessity and to military ambition. That 
event made this war an American war, a 
South American war, a Chinese war, a Span- 
ish war, an African war, a war on every man 
and every woman who hopes to live in free- 
dQm, in liberty, and in peaceful progress. 

And now, after a patience so long continued 
and so unexampled that it has been doubtless 
misunderstood on both sides of the Atlantic, 
the President has summed up in clear phrase 
that can escape no intelligence just what is the 
situation on this fateful day. He will attack 
no one. He will voluntarily take no human 
life. He will voluntarily destroy no man's 
property. But if it comes to be a question as 
to the farther invasion of the people of the 
United States and their rights, then that people 
must act as one man in their defense- or cease 
to exist as other than a vassal state. 

It may be — God grant it ! — that this im- 
pending crisis may be avoided. But if it is not, 
the duty of everv member of this University, 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 149 

man or woman, is perfectly plain. It is to say 
to the constituted authorities: "I am an Ameri- 
can citizen; I am a son or daughter of Colum- 
bia; where can I be of use ? What can I do ? 
Where are my capacities, my strength, my 
training available ? Can I use my skill on 
land, 'or on sea ? Can I use it in civil adminis- 
tration, can I use it in supporting the needy, 
in relieving the suffering of those who are taken 
by military necessity from their occupations 
and their homes ? Can I serve anywhere in 
the great army of peace-loving Americans who 
would only use force in order that right may 
speedily come to rule?" 

Men and women of Columbia, let no one of 
you hesitate. Let no one of you draw back 
from this great obligation if it shall be laid 
upon you by our government. Remember that 
the stirring words of Mr. Lowell's verses upon 
"The Present Crisis," written before most of 
us were born, have direct and appealing appli- 
cation to you and to me to-day: 



'Once to every man and nation comes the moment to 

decide, 
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or 

evil side; 



150 THE PRESENT CRISIS 

Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the 

bloom or blight, 
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon 

the right, 
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and 

that light." 

The opportunity to decide upon your patri- 
otic duty will go as quickly as it may come. 
Seize it for yourselves, seize it for your coun- 
try, seize it for Columbia ! 



XI 

IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 



An Address delivered at the Annual Dinner of the 

Chamber of Commerce, Pittsburgh, Pa., 

February 10, 1917 



IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 

He must be a poor and an unworthy Ameri- 
can who is not stirred by the European War 
and its lessons to serious reflection upon prob- 
lems affecting government and the future of 
civilization itself. This is no time to take 
things for granted. The great historic nations 
of the western world, those which have for two 
thousand years given shape and form and 
meaning to civilization and human progress, 
are shaken to their very depths. Experiences 
which might, under ordinary conditions, have 
extended over centuries, are being compressed 
into a few anxious and massively important 
years. No belligerent nation will emerge from 
this war on the same plane as that on which 
it was when the storm of war broke with such 
startling suddenness. Political institutions are 
being reshaped under the pressure of impera- 
tive national necessity with a speed and com- 
pleteness that have no precedent in history. 
Economic and industrial relationships of long 
standing and great authority have already been 
i53 



154 IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 

overturned and revolutionized. New and grave 
seriousness of purpose, new and severe national 
self-examination, have taken possession of hun- 
dreds of millions of highly civilized people, 
who in the midsummer of 1914 were walking 
nonchalantly along the paths of history as un- 
concerned, as gay, and as self-centred as a 
maiden singing on a country road in summer- 
time. The war has changed everything. Mi- 
nor differences have fallen into insignificance. 
Even larger differences have been pressed into 
the background by the unifying force of stern 
national necessity and conscious national pur- 
pose. Despite their tremendous losses in men, 
in treasure, and in irreparable monuments, the 
chief belligerent nations will be found to have 
gained much from the terrible experiences of 
this devastating war. Their gain will be in 
the larger matters of national policy and in 
matters of the mind, of the spirit, of individual 
and national character. How is it with our 
neutral and aloof America ? 

When we turn our eyes from the battle-fields 
and council chambers of Europe to our own 
land, abounding in material prosperity and 
spared the terrible cost of military participa- 



IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 155 

tion in the war, what do we find that in any 
way corresponds to the changes that have come 
over European opinion and European policy ? 
Are we Americans learning the great lessons 
that the war has to teach, or are we so self- 
confident, so self-centred, and so self-opinion- 
ated that we think Europe has nothing to 
teach ? Are we conscious of a distinct national 
purpose which commands our universal loyalty 
and devotion, or are we drifting on a sea of 
irresolution, divided counsels, and conflicting 
policies ? It is worth while to examine this 
question from several different points of view. 

Our representative men and our organs of 
opinion, both in high places and in low, are 
speaking and writing much of American par- 
ticipation in international affairs, of American 
guidance in shaping world policy, and of Ameri- 
can aid in securing and in fixing the peace of 
the world. Are we prepared for these great 
undertakings ? Are we so sure of our own 
ground, so firm and so clear in our opinions, 
and in our policies, so fortified in spirit and in 
material preparation, that we can confidently 
accept the challenge which the history of 



156 IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 

Europe is making to our purpose and our com- 
petence as a nation ? 

It is a commonplace that democracies find 
it difficult to engage effectively in international 
intercourse. This is less true of a democracy 
like the French Republic, which has behind it 
a long national tradition, than of one like our 
own, which is even yet a newcomer in the 
family of nations that lead the world. Our 
form of government, with its division of power 
and responsibility between executive and legis- 
lature, between the nation and the constituent 
States, makes difficulties for the formulation 
and execution of a consistent international pol- 
icy such as no other government in the world 
has to confront. Indeed, there are foreign 
nations that look upon the United States as in 
high degree irresponsible in international rela- 
tions, so great are the obstacles which our tem- 
perament and our governmental forms put in 
our path as a nation. We do not generally 
recognize the fact that our form of government 
makes possible and our political habits make 
increasingly frequent the modification or repeal 
of explicit treaty provisions by a subsequent 
act of Congress, without any notice to the 



IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 157 

other high contracting power. We do not 
appear to take account of the fact that our 
form of government permits and our tempera- 
ment encourages the denial by a State legisla- 
ture or other local authority of rights secured 
to aliens by the solemn act of the treaty-mak- 
ing power. The government of the United 
States has bound itself by numerous treaties 
to give rights to aliens and to protect those 
rights. Despite this fact, the personal and 
property rights of aliens have been repeatedly 
violated in the United States, and our friendly 
relations with foreign countries have thereby 
often been put in jeopardy. The list of unfor- 
tunate happenings of this kind in recent years 
is a disagreeably long one. Within the mem- 
ory of the generation now living, there have 
been outrageous attacks on aliens who were 
entitled by treaty to our protection, in Wyo- 
ming, in Washington, in Idaho, in Montana, in 
Oregon, in Alaska, in California, in Louisiana, 
in Texas, in Colorado, in Mississippi, and in 
Florida. It has been asserted that in the pas- 
sage of the so-called La Follette Shipping Bill 
by the Congress at its last session, more than 
twenty treaties were rudely violated. So long 



158 IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 

as these conditions continue to prevail, we 
Americans live in far too much of a glass house 
to make it wise to throw stones at other nations 
who refer to a treaty as a scrap of paper. 
There are orderly and proper ways to modify 
or even to abrogate a treaty whose provisions 
are no longer sustained by American public 
opinion, and it is this orderly and proper way 
that should invariably be taken if we are to 
have and to exert permanent and beneficial 
influence in the council of the nations. A 
treaty is part of the supreme law of the land 
and must be respected and enforced as such. 

If it be asked how are conditions to be bet- 
tered, the answer is, by a more intense, a more 
virile, and a more loyal nationalism. We must 
be Americans first, and citizens of a State or 
residents of a particular community afterward. 
We must give to the government of the United 
States, through the passage of legislation that 
has been recommended by Presidents Harrison, 
McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft, the power 
which it does not at present possess, to protect 
the treaty rights of aliens through direct action 
in the federal courts. At the present time the 
federal officers and their courts have no power 



IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 159 

to intervene, either for the protection of a 
foreign citizen or for the punishment of those 
who commit an outrage against him. We 
must learn again for this generation and for 
the twentieth century the lessons of the Consti- 
tution and "The Federalist," the lessons of the 
Civil War and reconstruction. Americans must 
give up their increasing tendency to think in 
terms of classes, or groups, or sections, or 
States, and learn to think nationally in terms 
of the whole United States, its aims, its inter- 
ests, and its honor. When America speaks or 
when America acts, the whole world should 
know that it speaks and acts as a nation and 
not as a series of conflicting and antagonistic 
groups or sections. When this comes to pass 
we shall have ceased to drift in our interna- 
tional policies and relationships. 

If America is drifting in regard to matters 
of foreign policy, it is drifting, too, in regard 
to critically important matters of domestic 
concern. Our whole industrial system will be 
overturned with immense loss and damage to 
every interest unless we can agree upon a 
policy to reconstruct and remodel it on new 



160 IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 

and sounder lines. Our present habit is to 
let things drift until some acute crisis occurs, 
and then to meet it by surrender or by compro- 
mise, without any regard to the future, but 
with eyes fixed only on the immediate present. 
The greater part of the public seem to be 
utterly oblivious to the critical position in 
which the great railway systems of the United 
States have been put, not by constructive regu- 
lation or governmental supervision, but by 
policies of competing, conflicting, and unrelated 
persecution and pin-pricking. The great rail- 
ways of the United States are national assets 
and they constitute the arterial system of our 
commercial and industrial life. They are ask- 
ing and they should quickly receive, single, 
consistent, and well-ordered constructive over- 
sight and regulation from the national govern- 
ment and from the national government alone. 
It was local interference with commerce that 
led directly to the formation of the Constitu- 
tion of the United States. It is local interfer- 
ence with commerce that now constitutes per- 
haps our most difficult domestic problem. 

Then, too, the time has come for us to ac- 
knowledge the primary obligation to the gen- 
eral public that rests upon every participant in 



IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 161 

any enterprise which is recognized as being 
invested with a public interest and which is to 
that extent under public supervision and con- 
trol. If our national sovereignty is not to be 
surrendered to a group or an economic class, 
we must insist upon it that no public service 
shall be crippled or paralyzed by the concerted 
act of a group of individuals, taken without 
inquiry on the part of public officials into any 
alleged grievance, and carried on without 
regard to the overmastering public interests. 
In a peaceful and orderly economic state there 
are other modes of rebellion than insurrection 
in arms. It is for public opinion to recognize 
and to define these modes of rebellion against 
public authority and to find ways and means, 
just, kindly, and considerate, of dealing with 
them. When any individual citizen enters the 
service of the state, either directly or through 
some form of public service that the state 
regulates, he does so not through compulsion, 
but of his own accord, and he thereby assumes 
a kind and strength of obligation which does 
not necessarily rest upon his fellow, whose oc- 
cupation lies outside of government or of gov- 
ernment-regulated activity. 

We should no longer hesitate to recognize 



162 IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 

that every great industry and every great cor- 
porate undertaking is primarily something hu- 
man, and not merely something mechanical, 
or material, or financial. It is not first of all 
an undertaking for gain, but it is first of all an 
undertaking in which human beings work to- 
gether for purposes of joint and common inter- 
est. The traditional dogma of economists that 
the ultimate agents in production are land, 
labor, and capital, and the usual corollary that 
labor and capital have conflicting and mutually 
exclusive interests in the carrying on of an 
industry, have done an immense amount of 
practical harm. Leaving land aside, the essen- 
tial elements in the production of wealth are 
all human beings and not dead abstractions 
to be spelled with a capital letter and treated 
as if they had neither flesh nor blood. It would 
be more accurate and more helpful if we were 
to classify the elements that enter into pro- 
ductive industry in threefold fashion: the man 
who works with his hands, the man who works 
with his head, and the man who works with 
his accumulations. Sometimes there is an 
overlapping of two of these classes, or in ex- 
treme cases even of all three of them, but, in 



IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 163 

general, each class represents a separate group 
in the industrial system. Each member of 
every such group should be made to have a 
common interest in their joint product. 

It is sound economic and industrial policy 
so to organize industry that every co-operating 
element shall have a personal interest in its 
success and a personal share in its gains. There 
is, of course, a standard or prevailing rate of 
wage for the man who works with his hands, a 
standard or prevailing rate of salary for the 
man who works with his head, and a standard 
or prevailing rate of interest for the man who 
works with his accumulations. The man who 
works with his accumulations takes the great- 
est chance, because wages and salaries must of 
necessity be paid before his interest can be 
provided for. With a view to humanizing the 
great industries and to binding every worker 
more closely and more loyally to his undertak- 
ing, to giving him back some of that joy in the 
job that was characteristic of the hand-worker 
in the past, why should it not be agreed that, 
when the stockholders of a great corporation 
receive more than a fixed minimum of interest 
upon their investment, a similar distribution 



1 64 IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 

shall be made in terms of wages and of salaries 
to those who work with their hands and with 
their heads ? Instead of an occasional bonus 
given as a favor at the end of a successful year, 
why should there not be a fixed percentage of 
salaries and of wages paid as a matter of right 
when the gains of an industry make it prac- 
ticable ? When there is an extra one per cent 
dividend to stockholders, might there not be 
an extra one per cent paid to those who re- 
ceive wages and salaries ? Under such a sys- 
tem every member of an industry, from the 
highest to the lowest, would feel a new pride 
in its increased productiveness, a new loyalty 
to it, a new interest in devices for saving time 
and eliminating waste, and a new satisfaction 
in increased profits. Why should we not leave 
off living on the edge of an economic* and in- 
dustrial volcano, waiting in fear and trembling 
until the next destructive and uncontrollable 
eruption shall occur, and settle down in relative 
peace and quiet, through the substitution of 
some such definite industrial aim as the one I 
suggest, conceived in human terms, for the 
policy of drifting which now governs so many 
of our economic and industrial relationships ? 



IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 165 

Such an aim would involve questions of hous- 
ing, of health, of education, of recreation, of 
credit for long service, and those other attri- 
butes of decent living and good citizenship which 
are already so much on the mind of many great 
corporate organizations and their managers. 

There is still another question that is divid- 
ing our people on which it would be easy to 
keep silent. It is, however, in my judgment, 
more honorable and more courageous for one 
who has convictions to speak them out. I 
refer to the question of preparation for national 
service under national control. No one can 
possibly hate the state of mind and the spirit 
that are militarism more than I do, and no one 
would resist more actively and emphatically 
any movement to change the peace-loving in- 
dustrial spirit and temper of our people for 
any of the older forms of militarism that are 
now slowly going to their death, let us hope 
never to be resurrected, on the battle-fields of 
Europe. But there is a call to national service 
and a preparation for it which, so far from 
sharing the spirit of militarism, are only the 
voice of democracy conscious of its obligations 



166 IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 

and its duties, as well as of its rights and op- 
portunities. We speak in general terms of the 
obligation which every citizen owes to his 
country, but what have we done to make that 
obligation precise and to fit each citizen to dis- 
charge it ? What have we done to render more 
than lip-service to the democratic principle ? 
Compulsion is not foreign to the spirit of democ- 
racy, although democracy uses it sparingly. 
Democracy lays its hands on the child, and 
for its own protection as well as for his good, 
says that he and his parents must discharge a 
certain obligation through attendance upon the 
elementary school. Social, economic, and po- 
litical conditions are so varied throughout our 
land that the results of this policy are widely 
different and are in some ways far from satis- 
factory. This is not due to the fact that the 
policy itself is unsound, but because we have 
not yet learned how most wisely to administer 
it. Through compulsory attendance upon the 
elementary school the state endeavors to pro- 
tect itself and each individual citizen from the 
dangers and limitations that attend illiteracy 
and the lack of all intellectual and moral disci- 
pline. In the light of our present experience, 



IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 167 

why should not the nation say to every youth 
approaching manhood: "We believe it to be in 
your interest and in ours that you should be 
required for a limited period in one year, or in 
each of two successive years, to subject your- 
self to definite, intensive, continuous training 
under national supervision and control, in 
order that you may first gain a new and vivid 
sense of the meaning and obligations of your 
citizenship, and in order that you may, in the 
second place, be physically and intellectually 
prepared to take part in your country's service, 
physical or military, should occasion for that 
use of your powers ever arise" ? In our recent 
discussions we have been thinking too largely 
of national service and of preparation for such 
service in purely military terms. This is easy 
to understand, for the history of the past three 
years has forced it upon us as a people; but, if 
there were no war in Europe, and if there were 
no thought or need of preparation for war else- 
where, this need for the preparation of every 
male citizen for national service would be just 
as real and just as pressing as I believe it to be 
to-day. This question goes to the very roots 
of an effective and loyal and continuing democ- 



168 IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 

racy. It can be shirked if you will, it can be 
compromised if you will, it can be postponed 
if you will, but it can be neither shirked nor 
compromised nor postponed without damage 
to the life of the people of the United States. 
Why not leave off drifting and have a definite, 
conscious aim in our preparation for the full 
duties of citizenship ? 

We are drifting, too, in matters of public ad- 
ministration. Taking it all in all, our govern- 
ment is probably the most incompetent and 
most costly on earth. This is because it is so 
largely a government by those who talk, and 
that we have been so successful in excluding 
from it those who think and those who do. 
We pay enough in taxes, and far more than 
enough, to get thoroughly satisfactory admin- 
istration of the public business; but we do not 
get this because competent administrators so 
rarely concern themselves with government or 
are chosen to responsible legislative or execu- 
tive office. If the government of the United 
States were run in accordance with those prin- 
ciples which control the activity of any great 
non-governmental undertaking, from a steel 



IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 169 

corporation to a university, it would be the 
envy and the admiration of the world. I do 
not recall that any great administrator has 
ever been chosen to be President of the United 
States, and few governors or mayors seem to 
take any interest in the improvement of ordi- 
nary administration, such as every manager of 
an industrial or business undertaking concerns 
himself with every day and every hour. A 
man who had in his own person been successful 
and competent in the administration of a great 
business, whether it be a railroad, or a bank, or 
a manufacturing corporation, or a steamship 
company, or anything else, might, if elected to 
the presidency of the United States, accomplish 
a really wonderful service for our people. Four 
years, or even eight years, would be all too 
short to cleanse the Augean stables of waste 
and incompetence, duplication and inefficiency, 
which make Washington notorious, but eight 
years, or even four years, might be enough to 
make a beginning which would so appeal to 
the people of the United States that they would 
compel its continuance at the hands of any 
party which might happen to be successful in 
a subsequent election. 



170 IS AMERICA DRIFTING? 

We are so concerned with our personal affairs, 
with our personal undertakings, and with our 
immediate interests that we are letting America 
drift. We give the feeblest possible support 
to the able and conscientious men who, here 
and there in the executive departments and in 
the national legislature, are doing their best to 
bear the heavy burden that has been put upon 
them. When such a man is sent to Washing- 
ton, we leave him alone to fight our battles and 
his as best he can, and to face unaided the 
forces of stagnation, routine, and selfishness. 
Once every four years we arouse from our leth- 
argy for a few weeks, and give more or less 
emotional expression to our aspirations and 
convictions; but when once the presidential 
election is over, we return to our several 
ploughs and America drifts again. What is 
everybody's business is nobody's business. 
Until every American feels his personal respon- 
sibility for the formulation of definite public 
policy at home and abroad, and for the busi- 
nesslike administration of public affairs, Amer- 
ica will continue to drift, and the rest of the 
world will continue to treat her as the spoiled 
child of the goddess of good fortune. 



XII 
LOOKING FORWARD 



An Address delivered before the Commercial Club, 
Cincinnati, Ohio, April 21, 1917 



LOOKING FORWARD 

This is a time when any one who rises to 
speak in public to his fellow Americans must 
do so with a feeling of heavy responsibility. 
There never was a time when there was so 
much that might be said; there perhaps never 
was a time when it was so difficult to say it 
freely, because the issue of the great struggle 
in which this world is engaged, despite all ap- 
pearances, still trembles in the balance. An 
unfortunate or an unhappy sentiment publicly 
expressed even by a private citizen might be 
found to do great damage to the precious cause 
which every American and every citizen of the 
world has so closely at heart. 

I remember the description which my father 
gave to me, such as your fathers must have 
given to many of you, of the state of feeling 
in this nation when Fort Sumter was fired on, 
and when the existence of this government, the 
integrity of the institutions that had been 
builded by the fathers, was suddenly put at 
stake. I confess to having had that kind of 
173 



174 LOOKING FORWARD 

feeling when I read that enemy troops had in- 
vaded Belgium; and I confess to having had it 
in redoubled measure, and in a way that stirred 
every feeling and sentiment that I possess, 
when I read with you the awful news of the 
sinking of the Lusitania. There will not be 
years enough left in my life to dim the memory 
of the feelings which those events stirred in me, 
of the trains of thought which they opened, of 
the lines of policy which they suggested, of the 
great series of problems which from that day 
to this have been unrolled before the world. 
There is no use just now in looking back. The 
past has made its own record. It belongs to 
history. In the generations that are to come 
careful students of the documents will extract 
from the record, and put where all mankind 
may forever see, the precise story of the events 
that mark the cataclysm which began on 
August I, 1914, and the end of which is not 
yet in sight. 

That, I say, belongs to history; but we as 
Americans, as lovers of liberty, as citizens of 
the world, as lovers of our kind of every race 
and every speech, are concerned with what lies 
in front of us. We are concerned not alone 



LOOKING FORWARD 175 

with the national task but with the interna- 
tional happenings; and we are concerned not 
alone with the winning — the prompt, complete, 
and decisive winning — of this war; but we are 
concerned with the reconstruction of the politi- 
cal organization of the world that shall make 
place, ample place, for those people who are 
to-day our enemies, and at the same time pre- 
vent so far as human power and human fore- 
sight can prevent, the happening again of any- 
thing to be compared with this. 

If we could imagine ourselves equipped with 
the modern press, the telegraph, the telephone, 
steam, and electricity, we might have been 
present at the fall of the Roman Empire and 
yet have witnessed nothing equal to this. We 
might under similar circumstances have been 
present over three hundred years at the Revival 
of Learning and yet have witnessed nothing 
comparable to this. 

Every great struggle in this world is a strug- 
gle of ideas. Mere brute force is only the sym- 
bol of a wrong idea, or of a paucity of ideas. 
The struggle is in essence between ideas, and 
not always do those who are conducting it ap- 
preciate or realize that they are the bearers of 



176 LOOKING FORWARD 

the hopes or the hates of men. But when we 
look back to interpret the happenings of the 
past two thousand years, we see that in so far 
as the battle-fields of the world and the great 
military contests have not been purely dynas- 
tic, or personal, or predatory in character, they 
represented a conflict of ideas and of ideals. 

Several times the history of this world has 
hung on the point of a spear. Each time the 
overruling Providence which guides and makes 
history has seen to it that the solution was 
toward the greater freedom, the greater prog- 
ress, the greater liberty, the greater enfran- 
chisement of man. 

It was a very small group of men, compara- 
tively, that landed from Persian ships on the 
immortal plains of Marathon; but if that little 
battle had gone differently the philosophy, the 
civilization, and the institutions of Asia would 
have made western Europe their own, and this 
continent would have been colonized fifteen 
hundred years afterward, if at all, by men who 
professed the philosophy, the politics, and the 
religion of those Asiatic peoples. 

Time and time again, sometimes on a nar- 
row field, sometimes in a mountain pass, some- 



LOOKING FORWARD 177 

times at a Gettysburg, men have been thrown 
against each other in larger or in smaller mass, 
and the stake of victory was the world's policy 
or the life of a nation. 

This controversy was apparently so simple in 
its origins — an ultimatum to Serbia, an answer, 
a declaration of war, a Russian mobilization, a 
German mobilization, a French mobilization, 
an invasion of Belgium, an English mobiliza- 
tion, and the world was in flames. Because 
that contest was apparently so simply begun, 
what was involved was hidden from the people 
of this nation. It has taken us two long years 
and a half to see that behind those struggling 
heroes that wear the uniform of France, and 
behind that great, silent, powerful British navy, 
were protected the Constitution and the laws 
of these United States. No war was being 
made on the Constitution and the laws of these 
United States; but war was being made on the 
ideas upon which that Constitution and those 
laws are based, and upon which alone they 
could be based and survive ! This is therefore 
a war of high principle and in no sense a war 
of conquest. Let us never sing a hymn of 
hate to those who are for the moment worship- 



178 WOKING FORWARD 

ping a false god. A hymn of hate is just as 
unlovely when sung in English as in German. 
It is too solemn, it is too stupendous a con- 
troversy for hate; because if its issue be as we 
would have it, we shall lift another people to 
this high plane — a people at this moment in 
mighty arms against us. 

Then we see what, at bottom ? It is said 
that we see a conflict between autocracy and 
democracy, between despotism and liberty. 
We do; but we see something far more subtle 
than that. We see a conflict between two the- 
ories of politically organized man, one written 
in undying words in our own Declaration of 
Independence, that all governments derive 
"their just powers from the consent of the 
governed "; and the other based on the theory 
of a state all-powerful, unrestrained, superior 
to the limitations of law and morality, having 
a high end of its own which no power can re- 
strain except by force, and which must sustain 
and extend itself by force. What is challenged 
in this contest is the Preamble to the Declara- 
tion of Independence of the United States. 

That is why this has never been a European 
war. It began in Europe; but it never was a 



LOOKING FORWARD 179 

European war. It might have been a Euro- 
pean war if this country were a desert; but it 
could not be a European war so long as this 
country is concerned with ideas of government. 
The slow process of a glacier takes time; but 
you have seen in the heights of the Alps, or in 
our own northwestern mountains, its slow, 
creeping progress toward the overwhelming 
destruction of everything that stands in its 
way. This theory of an all-powerful, non- 
moral state, having its own rights self-given, 
not dependent on the just consent of the gov- 
erned, armed with force and proceeding by 
might, would in time, unrestrained and unre- 
stricted, like the glacier, have crept down the 
valleys of this western world and reduced them 
to sterile subjection to its might. I blame no 
individual human being for this war. I seek 
to bring no individuals to the bar of judgment, 
because I believe that ideas are so much more 
powerful than individuals that when they get 
those individuals in their grasp the latter are 
simply instruments of those stupendous forces 
struggling for the mastery of the mind and the 
conscience of man. It is that which we have 
been looking out upon. It is that which by 



180 LOOKING FORWARD 

one happening and one act after another, here 
a little, there a little, has brought this glacier 
more and more close to the land on which we 
stand, until finally the eyes of our people are 
opened and they see that they are concerned, 
deeply, nationally, and individually concerned 
in this contest, because their ideals are at stake. 

Why should we have taken so long? Why 
should it have been hidden from us for two 
years and a half, that this war was ours, was 
all the world's; was a war on democracy and 
liberalism in Japan; on the rising movement of 
democracy and liberalism in Spain and the 
South American republics, as well as on the 
United States and every land where these ideals 
are cherished; why should it have taken so 
long ? The answer hurts one to give. It took 
so long because for a generation, with all our 
changes and chances, we as a people have been 
living in the lap of material luxury and gain, 
and we had almost forgotten our soul. We 
had almost forgotten the soul of this nation. 

Turn back, when opportunity serves, to the 
congressional and public debates and orations 
of the first forty years of our nation's life. 
There you will find the record of the spoken 



LOOKING FORWARD 181 

words of men of every party, of every section, 
of all shades of opinion and belief; and through 
all their sentences and paragraphs there shines 
a soul. They knew that the body of this na- 
tion needed a soul to make it live. They had 
a clear conception of that soul, and they saw 
to it that this nation's body was given a soul. 

We had almost forgotten our soul. We had 
apparently gotten to a point where we seemed 
to think that the world would go on no matter 
what we did; that somebody else would take 
care of liberty, somebody else would take care 
of justice, somebody else would take care of 
freedom, somebody else would take care of 
the open sea, somebody else would take care 
of the world's peace; and that we individually 
could go about our several businesses and let 
that "somebody" run the world! It cannot 
be done ! No way has been found in a democ- 
racy of hiring Hessians to govern us; we must 
either govern ourselves, or drift on the tide of 
helpless serfdom to those peoples and those 
nations which are willing, as well as able, to 
govern. 

Finally we have seen this vision; and now, 
thank God ! the American people, conscious of 



182 LOOKING FORWARD 

their soul, are hurrying to points of vantage 
from which they can look forward. They are 
sure of the past, and they are eagerly question- 
ing the future, each according to his kind, as 
to what it holds in store for men and for na- 
tions, and particularly for this dear nation of 
ours. 

I said a moment ago that even after these 
two years and a half, and despite the happen- 
ings of recent weeks, the event still hangs in 
the balance. It does. It hangs in the balance 
for two reasons: first, no adequate means has 
yet been found by any belligerent, or group of 
belligerents, effectively to cope with the de- 
struction of tonnage by the submarine. Sir 
Edward Carson, the First Lord of the Admi- 
ralty, stated, speaking in the House of Com- 
mons the other day, that in the time under 
review forty combats with submarines had 
taken place, and he left it to be inferred that 
most or all of them had been successful; but 
the fact of the matter is, as every man inter- 
ested in the world's shipping knows, that with 
the withdrawal of tonnage from commerce for 
the customary purposes of war, with the lock- 
ing up of tonnage owing to internment, high 



LOOKING FORWARD 183 

rates of insurance, and danger from submarine 
attack, and with the actual destruction of 
tonnage which goes on week by week, it is not 
yet certain that that particular mode of war- 
fare will not prove even more powerful than 
has been supposed. Let me give one illustra- 
tion. 

There has been comment and discussion as 
to the relation of Italy to this war. Why has 
not Italy, populous, well to do, with a large 
and well-trained army, made more contribu- 
tion to the allied cause through effective mili- 
tary operations ? There are political explana- 
tions into which I shall not enter; but I will 
give you one economic explanation. Italy is 
paralyzed from the mountains to the sea from 
the lack of coal. Italy imports in normal times 
ten million tons of coal a year. When the war 
broke out the English government agreed to 
furnish five million tons; and at once Italy had 
to reduce by 50 per cent its coal consumption, 
even at a time when an enormous increase was 
demanded for the manufacture of munitions. 
Now England has had to serve Italy notice 
that no more coal can be delivered unless Italy 
can provide the bottoms. That is a situation 



184 LOOKING FORWARD 

which does not lie on the surface, but is one 
of the economic facts out of which the problems 
of this war have so largely arisen. I have cited 
that as one illustration, to which others might 
be added. 

A second matter relates to Russia. If the 
provisional government of Russia is able to 
maintain itself, and if its army holds firm on 
the eastern front, there is every reason to be- 
lieve that the war may be ended successfully 
within a reasonable time, say within the pres- 
ent calendar year. But if the morale of the 
Russian army is broken, or if by communistic 
outbreak such as took place in Paris in the 
winter and spring of 1871 following the Ger- 
man occupation, the hand of the provisional 
government should be paralyzed; if the Central 
Powers were to obtain possession of the agri- 
cultural and manufacturing resources of Rus- 
sia, this war might go on for years. 

To sit here in comfort and suppose that be- 
cause these magnificent men of whose efforts 
we read with such anxious and joyous care 
every morning and every night, are doing such 
splendid things along the western front that 
there is nothing for us to do, that we can sim- 



LOOKING FORWARD 185 

ply ride upon the field at the eleventh hour 
and share in the acclaim of the victors, is abso- 
lutely false. Nothing if persisted in could be 
more disastrous. 

This one hundred millions of people has got 
to go to war. It will not do to saunter into 
war. It will not do simply to increase the in- 
come tax, to make a huge loan, and to read 
about war. War, with all its terrors, with all 
its horrors, with all its obligations, is on in 
this country, and our country's existence hangs 
in the balance. The American who cannot see 
that cannot read the plainest signs of the times; 
for even ideas, however powerful, however 
splendid, however noble, however uplifting — 
even ideas will not walk alone ! Even ideas 
will not provide Italy with coal; even ideas will 
not cover the ocean with ships; even ideas will 
not grow a food supply adequate for this na- 
tion and for export; even ideas and speeches 
will not fulfil our obligations to those nations 
and those men who in darkness and in daylight 
have been fighting for your property and mine, 
for your government and mine, for your ideas 
and mine ! 

It is essential to the soul of the United States 



1 86 LOOKING FORWARD 

that it should express itself in terms that his- 
tory will not misunderstand. It is essential to 
the soul of the United States that we should 
make use, in the aid and interest of our fellows 
as well as of ourselves, of the great experience, 
the great opportunity, the great blessings, of 
the past century and a half. 

We are trustees of a great and sacred trust. 
We have been given by Providence out of the 
womb of time this government with all its 
potentiality, with all its accomplishment, and 
with all its promise; and the question that 
comes home at this hour with burning force to 
every American is, how am I discharging my 
trusteeship ? Not what is somebody else do- 
ing! — not what is somebody else doing! Not 
what is the President doing, not what is the 
Congress doing, not what is the French army 
doing, not what is the British navy doing — 
but what am I as trustee doing to preserve, 
to protect, and to perpetuate those ideals of 
government in which we not only believe as 
unassailable truths, but which we in our heart 
of hearts are convinced give the largest measure 
of promise to every people on this earth who 
will embrace them and make them their own. 






LOOKING FORWARD 187 

We look, then, into the future clothed with 
a heavy and a solemn obligation; an obligation 
not simply to support the government — for 
that is conventional and banal — but with an 
obligation for personal service with head and 
heart and hand, in each and every one of those 
ways that shall contribute to the establishment 
of a just peace, durable because based on sound 
and lasting principles, a peace which will sup- 
press and oppress no man and no nation, how- 
ever it may be defeated in this war. 

There are some things that follow from that 
argument as necessary corollaries. I should 
like to address myself for a moment or two to 
a contention frequently made in public that 
we have no concern with Europe, that we are 
isolated from its controversies and its contests, 
and that Washington himself, our most august 
American, specifically warned us against "en- 
tangling alliances." He did. But the most 
entangling alliance this nation could make 
would be an alliance with itself to cut itself ofF 
from the whole wide world ! George Washing- 
ton warned us against entangling alliances with 
individual nations against other nations — and 
he was right ! We have never departed from 



1 88 LOOKING FORWARD 

that counsel, and I see no reason in the history 
of the intervening years, or in the outlook for 
the future, to suppose that we should so depart. 
But an alliance with one nation against another 
nation is quite a different thing from standing 
upright among our fellow men to bear our full 
responsibility for the perpetuity of the world's 
freedom and civilization. What sort of figure 
should we cut in history if a thousand years 
from now some far-off scholar looks back upon 
us with his telescope and writes the history of 
the twentieth century A. D., and finds a stu- 
pendous struggle for liberty, for the rights of 
small nations, for the maintenance of public 
law and treaty obligations, going on in Europe, 
and a hundred millions of contented, self-sat- 
isfied people sitting away across three thousand 
miles of sea, and saying like the Pharisee of 
old: "I am not as these men are, I am relieved 
from any responsibility for what they may say 
or do" ? Our fathers came to this continent 
to achieve something not for themselves alone. 
Read every word they ever wrote. Read the 
Declaration of Independence, read the Consti- 
tution, read those immortal words that can be 
printed on the palm of the hand that were 



LOOKING FORWARD 189 

spoken to you yonder at Gettysburg, and see 
whether that program of American policy is a 
selfish program, or whether it is a program of 
service to mankind ? 

No; steam, electricity, commerce, travel, fi- 
nance, literature, science, the spread of ideas, 
the zeal for the very things that we believe in, 
have unified this round world into one family 
of nations, into one human society; and, as 
Mazzini said a generation ago: "Thank God, 
the philosophy of Cain has passed out of this 
world forever ! We are our brothers' keepers." 
We are with them the keepers of an idea; and 
we can no more, in honor or in conscience or 
consistently with our history, shirk this respon- 
sibility than we can give the lie to our spoken 
word or written bond; far less so, for that would 
be a personal failing and a personal crime or 
sin, while this would be a great public crime 
committed in the forum of human history and 
in the full sight of every immortal soul that 
has gone before, and would continue to be so 
regarded by every human being that remains 
to be born upon this earth. We dare not, gen- 
tlemen, we dare not ! 

We have ourselves in our earlier public policy 



i go LOOKING FORWARD 

done nobler things than that. Our fathers, 
and our fathers' fathers, were in the closest 
relation with the political and international 
happenings of Europe. What about the influ- 
ence of Benjamin Franklin, of Thomas Jeffer- 
son, of John Quincy Adams, of Chancellor Liv- 
ingston, of Henry Clay, and of the whole series 
of great men who laid the foundations on which 
we are building bit by bit the superstructure ? 
Do not forget that the name that has most 
enchained the hearts of the people of the 
United States next only to Washington and 
Lincoln themselves, is the name of La Fayette. 
When he came back, an aging man, to visit the 
country that he had helped to save and to 
make, his was a triumphal progress from capital 
to capital and from city to city. I venture to 
say that at this moment there are probably 
more counties, towns, and villages in the 
United States that bear the name of La Fayette 
than bear the name of any other human being. 
That testifies to the relationship a century ago. 
When Kossuth, the Hungarian liberal and 
revolutionist, came to this country, everything 
was done to welcome him to the United States 
because he was rebelling against a tyrannical 



LOOKING FORWARD 191 

government at home. Those fathers felt the 
electric spark of sympathy with an idea; and 
they did not hesitate to give it expression in 
the written and the spoken word. 

No, gentlemen, what cut us off from our just 
relations to the civilized world was our own 
unhappy division over slavery, and the result- 
ing war between the States. That was the 
knife which severed the bond that had from 
the very beginning united us in sympathy and 
in understanding to the older civilization. 
What we are doing now is not for an instant 
anything new, not for an instant anything 
revolutionary. We are repairing the damage 
wrought by that great civil dissension; we are 
going back to our just place as lovers and recog- 
nizers of liberty, and showing ourselves ready 
and willing to stretch a hand across any sea 
to those who battle for our ideas, and therefore 
for us ! That is traditional American policy. 

Let no man who has only read fifty years of 
American history, who has only seen the cur- 
tain that we let fall between the two acts, at- 
tempt to introduce us to the subject-matter of 
the drama. The drama, the great world drama, 
goes on everlastingly. Our relation to it is a 



192 LOOKING FORWARD 

matter for our intelligence and our conscience 
and our sense of high principle. Do you realize 
that the world owes to us — looking now to the 
credit side of the account for a moment — do 
you realize that the world owes to us very 
much of the progress which had already been 
made toward international organization when 
this war broke out ? The great importance in 
history, in American history, of the two Hague 
Conferences of 1899 and 1907 does not seem 
to be generally recognized. The Conference of 
1899 was called by the Tsar of Russia to dis- 
cuss disarmament. The United States was 
represented by a distinguished delegation. 
When the nations assembled at The Hague they 
soon discovered through interchange of views 
on the part of their representatives that dis- 
armament was impossible and impracticable. 
They discovered what any man, I think, who 
examines that question candidly will discover, 
that armaments, while the instruments of war, 
are not the causes of war, and that to take 
away the instruments and leave the causes 
would mean to expose this world to still more 
dreadful, still more costly, still more inhuman 
wars. Therefore, they said: "We cannot dis- 



LOOKING FORWARD 193 

arm; let us adjourn." The American delega- 
tion said: "No; do not adjourn. Cannot we 
do something, make some slight progress toward 
the prevention of war ? Cannot we take some 
step that will make these tremendous outbursts 
less likely ?" And the project was brought for- 
ward for a Court of Arbitration. It was dis- 
cussed for some time; it was accepted by France 
and by Great Britain, and by other nations; 
it was strongly opposed by the representatives 
of the German Empire. Then happened this: 
Doctor Andrew D. White, clarum et verier abile 
nomen, the senior member of the American 
delegation, formerly Minister at the Court of 
Berlin, wrote a personal letter to the German 
Emperor and pleaded with him for the sake of 
the future to instruct the German delegates to 
alter their attitude. That letter was intrusted 
to the secretary of the American delegation, 
the late Frederick W. Holls, unfortunately gone 
from earth all too soon to render the splendid 
services to the better organization of the world 
of which he was capable. In a two days' inter- 
view with the German Emperor and Prince von 
Buelow, Count von Buelow as he was then, 
that letter of Doctor White's, aided by the 



194 LOOKING FORWARD 

personal influence of Mr. Holls, brought about 
instructions from the German Emperor to the 
German delegation at The Hague to change 
their attitude. They did change it; and the 
first Court of Arbitral Justice was established. 
The United States made that contribution 
toward the better organization of the world. 
Some day that letter of Doctor White's will be 
seen to have been an epoch-making one in the 
history of American diplomacy and in the his- 
tory of international organization. Then the 
Conference adjourned. There were those who 
said in America and in Europe: "The Confer- 
ence has been a failure. Why try to put life 
into this chimerical idea?" But the President 
of the United States, Mr. Roosevelt, hurried 
before that court the Pious Fund case between 
the United States and Mexico, and gave an 
impressive lesson to the world of two sovereign 
nations submitting a claim involving their sov- 
ereign rights to the decision of five private gen- 
tlemen in black coats at the Dutch capital. 
Again the United States had made a powerful 
contribution to the organization of the world. 
A few years ago it was my privilege to sit 
for a time in the Court at The Hague, and I 



LOOKING FORWARD 195 

saw what I shall always remember as one of 
the most impressive sights of my life. Five 
gentlemen entered at ten o'clock, as they might 
in any American appellate court, took their 
places upon the bench, and without any more 
ado counsel rose in his place and commenced 
his argument. The counsel was Elihu Root, 
Senator from the State of New York, presenting 
the case of the United States of North America 
against Great Britain in regard to the New- 
foundland fisheries; a case which had brought 
the two countries involved to the verge of war 
a dozen times in the century. He presented it 
as quietly, in as lawyer-like fashion, as if he 
were arguing in the Circuit Court of Appeals 
or before the Supreme Court of the United 
States. He was followed after a time by op- 
posing counsel, the Attorney-General of Eng- 
land, who rose in his place to present the op- 
posing argument. Days, weeks, went by; the 
exhibits and the testimony were submitted, 
argument was heard, the court rendered its 
decision, and the Newfoundland Fisheries case 
between Great Britain and the United States 
disappeared from the history of trouble-making 
diplomacy, after having occupied a prominent 



196 LOOKING FORWARD 

place in it for a century. Again the United 
States had made a powerful contribution to 
the better organization of the world. 

And then it was urged that The Hague Con- 
ference should be convened again. The Reac- 
tionary party in Russia were in power; they 
kept the Tsar from calling it. The President 
of the United States, at that time Mr. Roose- 
velt, gave notice that if the Tsar did not call 
it, he would. The Tsar called it ! The Second 
Hague Conference assembled in 1907; and there 
this Court of Arbitration, which was really not 
a court in the strict sense of the word, but a 
body of diplomatic negotiators not bound by 
law, but trying to arrive at an agreement by 
mutual consent, concession, and yielding, gave 
way to the idea of a real court, an International 
Court of Justice. This project was presented 
on the instructions of the Secretary of State of 
the United States, Mr. Root, through the 
American delegation headed by Mr. Choate. 
When Mr. Choate rose to present that argu- 
ment before The Hague Conference, he opened 
by saying: "We have now spent weeks in regu- 
lating the laws of war; can we not spend a few 
hours in trying to prevent war?" And he 



LOOKING FORWARD 197 

brought forward the plan which after weeks of 
discussion was agreed to as a satisfactory plan. 
The Hague Conference then adjourned with- 
out a constituted court only because the small 
nations and the great could not agree as to 
how the judges should be appointed in the 
first instance. That was the condition when 
the present war broke out. 

Remember that this proposal for a genuine 
International Court has been assented to by 
Great Britain, by Germany, by France, by 
Austria, by Italy, by Russia, by Japan, and 
by the United States; and there it stands. 
And when this war is over, that is the point 
at which we should begin; we should resume 
our constructive work at the point at which 
this war broke it off. We can say, as no other 
people in the world can say: "We can give you 
out of the whole of our experience with the 
one hundred and twenty-odd years of the 
Supreme Court of the United States, an ex- 
ample of just how this institution will work, 
just what problems will arise, just how it has 
been found satisfactory to settle them between 
the first thirteen and now forty-eight sovereign 
States of the American Union/' 



198 LOOKING FORWARD 

I will not go into detail. The international 
organization of the world is a most fascinating 
subject. Few of us know how far it has pro- 
ceeded. When this war broke out there were 
about two hundred and fifty international or- 
ganizations that had their seat of business at 
Brussels, dealing with every sort and kind of 
activity, commercial, industrial, scientific, liter- 
ary, governmental, and behind them all lay 
this great conception of an international ju- 
dicial process. 

Now what is required for the carrying out 
in the future of that great American policy ? 
Two things are required: first, the supremacy 
in the world of the rule of law, and the sup- 
pression forever, if possible, of the rule of 
might. There is needed that good-will among 
men which is the only final sanction of public 
action. Forms of organization will help, but 
they alone will not suffice. Legislation may 
help, but it will not accomplish. The real 
problem before America and the world, the 
problem that stares us in the face as we look 
forward is, how to secure for ourselves, how 
to spread abroad among others, that belief in 
law and order, and that good-will which will 



LOOKING FORWARD 199 

put blood and nerves and life, body and brain, 
into a great legal organization that the nations 
may agree to work under. 

That is your problem and mine; that is the 
problem of the Frenchman, of the Briton, of 
the Italian, of the German, of the Russian, of 
the Bulgarian, of the Japanese, and the rest. 
Order, peace, prosperity, cannot be imposed on 
this world by might. A temporary victory of 
that kind would mean a new outbreak of the 
irrepressible spirit of liberty as soon as it could 
catch its breath after its defeat. The tempo- 
rary triumph of might would mean indefinite 
wars on this earth : for the men upon it are fac- 
ing the front; they are looking for the light; 
and they are not going because of the fine 
phrases of a false philosophy to put upon their 
minds and upon their bodies the shackles that 
it has taken hundreds of years to strike from 
the limbs of their ancestors. 

So, gentlemen, many as are the outlooks upon 
the future, that is the one which looms largest 
to me, that is the one which it seems to me 
has the most significance for each one of us. 
There are others vitally important. You must 
have observed with what speed the necessities 



200 LOOKING FORWARD 

of war have caused the complete social, indus- 
trial, and financial reconstruction of great na- 
tions. The Great Britain of 1914 does not 
exist; there is a new Great Britain of 1917. 
The France of 19 14 does not exist; there is a 
new France of 191 7; and the United States of 
1914 does not exist, and never will exist again ! 
There is a new United States beginning to be 
born. A whole series of economic problems 
that have been intrusted by us to individual 
initiative and competition are in these Euro- 
pean countries already, and in our own country 
to-morrow, to be cast in a new form where they 
are to be approached by men in association 
with each other and with government. 

That change has in it an element of strength 
and an element of danger; but whatever ele- 
ments it has, here it is. If this reorganization 
in Great Britain, in France, and in America, 
proves effective, as it bids fair to, in ending 
this war successfully, the populations of these 
countries will never wholly desert it even in 
times of peace. Therefore, we must be pre- 
pared for a new outlook upon our industrial 
and commercial life. We must expect to find 
that we are called on for a far larger measure 



LOOKING FORWARD 201 

of co-operation and subjection to control than 
ever before. If that can be accomplished with- 
out destruction of individual initiative, without 
depriving the individual of the just rewards of 
his endeavor, without reducing all men to the 
common level of mediocrity, it will have in it 
elements of progress, of success, and of happi- 
ness. If, on the other hand, it proves simply 
to be a new chain under the guise of an invi- 
tation to liberty, we shall find ways and means 
of loosening it; because, gentlemen, the one 
thing that will not be kept down, the one thing 
that no power can forever control, is the desire 
of the human heart to be free; free to think, 
free to express itself under ordinary and just 
limitations that fix the equal rights of others; 
free to labor; free to maintain itself in posses- 
sion of its just gains. Because we know that 
if we surrender that, we again exalt an all- 
powerful state above the individual, and then 
it is not long before we shall pay tribute to it 
as possessing those mysterious powers which 
are but the symbol of might and tyranny. 

There are dangers in success; there are dan- 
gers in the very solutions that are proposed of 
the problems that will lead to success; but if 



-202 LOOKING FORWARD 

we look all these problems in the face, if we 
understand them, if we keep our heads clear, 
our tempers in control, we may be able to sur- 
render what is needed, to do our just part, 
without impairing those fundamental things in 
which we all so profoundly believe and which 
are at stake in this war. 

There could be no more cynical conclusion 
of this war than for those of us who are allies 
to defeat the German army on the field of bat- 
tle and to surrender in the process to the ideas 
that have taken the Germans captive and sent 
them into this contest. It is as necessary for 
us to defeat the spirit of might and militarism 
in our own hearts and in our own land, in our 
own economic industrial organization, as it is 
to prevent it from conquering on the field of 
battle. That is the dilemma, that is the diffi- 
culty, which confronts us. 

So here we stand, looking out across this 
troubled and dangerous sea to those who are 
for the moment protecting us; making ready, 
let us hope as speedily as may be, and in all 
possible ways, to give them support, and to 
join them as we should with our flag, our ships, 
and our men. 



LOOKING FORWARD 203 

We are looking across the sea, facing not 
only war but problems of life, problems of con- 
duct, problems of political and economic organ- 
ization. It will be a supreme test of the ca- 
pacity of the American people to rule, not 
others but themselves, and to control, not de- 
pendents, but their own interests; to keep their 
place without losing it, and to take their just 
place without pushing aside any other human 
being who is entitled to the same rights that 
we claim for ourselves. 



XIII 
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



An Address delivered at a Meeting of the National 

Institute of Arts and Letters at the Hudson 

Theatre, New York, April 23, 1917 



THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

I could wish that this honorable and difficult 
task had fallen into other hands than mine. 
The story which Mr. Kennan has just recited 
out of the wealth of his experience, his observa- 
tion, and his participation is but one chapter 
in the long record of political and civil crime 
that so stirs one's blood and so causes one's 
gorge to rise that it is difficult to speak in this 
public presence, as one should speak, with re- 
straint and yet with appropriate feeling and 
appreciation. For myself, the events of these 
last months and years are so much the most 
important happenings in two thousand years of 
history that I find it difficult not only to speak 
of them, but to think of them, without constant 
use of superlatives, without those comparisons 
and that emphasis which often destroy by their 
very strength. And of all these events, of all 
these happenings, what more stupendous than 
the spectacle of a great national giant, that 
stretches its huge limbs over a seventh of the 
earth's surface and includes in its population 
207 



208 THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

nearly two hundred millions of human beings, 
rising to the full stature of a free nation in the 
midst of a world at war, with every danger 
internal and external threatening, and yet with 
the sacrifice of fewer lives than Mr. Kennan's 
censor would have sent to the gallows or to 
prison in a single month ? This is the triumph 
of an idea ! The men of letters and the artists 
gathered here, who are devoted to the expres- 
sion in their several media of an idea and an 
ideal, are the first and the quickest to recog- 
nize the significance of what has happened. 

What has happened is not the framing of a 
constitution; none has yet been drawn. What 
has happened is not the success of an armed 
revolution; there has been none. What has 
happened is not what happened at Whitehall 
in January, 1649, or what happened in the 
Place de la Concorde in January, 1793; for that 
has not happened. What has happened is 
that an idea, slowly germinating in the mind 
of a great people who have been set off by lan- 
guage, by religion, by custom, by barriers of 
geography from a great portion of the western 
world, has given birth to a new political era 
for that people and has moved the boundary 



THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 209 

between East and West from the Vistula nearly 
to the Yellow Sea^ 

The great Slavic nation has thrown in its 
lot with the West. It has given expression to 
the idea which makes the West, the idea which 
one day will make the newest West out of the 
whole of the immemorial East. That idea is 
the product of philosophy and of letters. That 
idea has called into being the great master- 
pieces of the poet, of the writer of imaginative 
prose, of the historian, of the seer, of him who 
works in plastic materials, bending them to 
spiritual and intellectual forms. That idea is 
the idea of human liberty. There have been 
attempts — how numerous it would be common- 
place to mention — to hold it in check, to keep 
it back; but like a great, all-powerful, slow- 
moving, fateful glacier it has come down from 
its fastnesses in the human heart and the 
human soul, watered by the perpetual snows 
of human aspiration, until it is conquering, not 
for destruction but for fruitfulness, all the 
green valleys which lay spread out before its 
path. 

Perhaps the most potent force in this world 
to-day is the force of a man of letters who has 



2io THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

been dead for one hundred and forty years, a 
man whose philosophy was absurd, whose 
knowledge of history was negligible, whose 
character was grotesque, whose contradictions 
were almost as numerous as his utterances. 
But the reason why Jean Jacques Rousseau put 
force and life into the American, the French, 
and the Russian revolutions was that with all 
his limitations, with all his oddities, he preached 
the gospel of human liberty in ways that ordi- 
nary men and women could read and under- 
stand. If we look back across the troubled gen- 
erations that lie between him and us, we must 
forgive him for his faults, for his absurdities, 
for his crudities, and take note only of the fact 
that the idea which he was moved to put into 
so many different literary forms had about it 
such power, such charm, such immortality, that 
it is carrying his name at this moment around 
the earth as one of the effective makers and 
shapers of this spiritual rebirth of the Slavic 
people. Rousseau was a man of letters; and 
we celebrate this far-off genius in this last act, 
this latest expression, of the current of thought 
which he did so much to direct. For he had 
not originality enough to invent or to discover 



THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 211 

it; he had simply the power to make it take 
hold of men and women of different speech, of 
different lands, of different race, of different 
traditions. 

The centre of gravity of the world's interest 
has shifted, and we now see as we could not 
see a year ago the real meaning of the great 
military struggle that is engaging the manhood 
and the wealth of the world. As a struggle 
between autocracy and liberty it was anoma- 
lous so long as the Tsar and Autocrat of all 
the Russias was found in the ranks of liberty; 
but now that his people have thrown off the 
domino which they have worn for three hun- 
dred years, they stand out in their true uni- 
form as another struggling democratic people, 
marching upward toward the light. 

Those of us who remember our history must 
be careful not to let our enthusiasm outrun 
our judgment. A great thing is happening; 
but it has only just begun to happen and there 
are many obstacles, many difficulties, many 
possibilities of error and delay in the path. 
See how long it has taken the English-speaking 
peoples to build their institutions, and how 
anxious they still are to improve them. See 



212 THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

how long it took France, even after her revolu- 
tion had begun, to establish on firm founda- 
tion and with common consent a Third Repub- 
lic that was safe from internal corruption and 
damage. We must not expect Russia to do 
at once what it has taken England, America, 
and France generations and even centuries to 
accomplish. The very autocracy under which 
Russians have lived has deprived them of 
much of the stimulus and the material for swift 
institution-building. Yet they have come late, 
and they so have the advantage of the expe- 
rience, of the errors as well as of the successes, 
of those of us who have gone before. 

One lesson the Russians will learn if they 
look us straight in the face, if they look Eng- 
land, and France, and America straight in the 
face; and that is that liberty does not mean 
license, but discipline. Liberty means self- 
discipline; it means reaching out with the hand 
of history and the hand of philosophy and the 
hand of observation and taking into oneself 
and making one's own those principles of con- 
duct, personal and political, those forms of 
organization, civic and social, which history 
justifies and which the conscience of mankind 



THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 213 

approves. That is self-discipline, the self-dis- 
cipline of an individual and the self-discipline 
of a nation. No nation, old or young, Latin or 
Slav, Anglo-Saxon or Teuton, will ever be free 
until it disciplines itself. To insist upon that 
fact, is perhaps the greatest service we can 
render our newly emancipated friends across the 
sea and across the warring lands that lie be- 
tween. When we welcome them to the sister- 
hood of free self-governing nations, let us not 
welcome them without some fair warning as 
to our difficulties and problems, without some 
suggestion as to the obstacles that lie in their 
path, that they may not make the mistake that 
some have made who have gone before in 
thinking that a revolution is effected by a 
single turn of the human wheel. The mere 
abdication of a Tsar does not constitute a de- 
mocracy. 

When the present revolutionary movement 
took its rise with the general strike and the 
massacres of twelve or thirteen years ago, an 
American observer journeyed to Russia to take 
note of the happenings. In a conversation with 
Tolstoy he said that he had come to remain a 
year or two to study the Russian revolution. 



214 THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

Tolstoy said: "Come prepared to stay for fifty 
years." Tolstoy was right. We are only at 
the beginning of a great public movement which 
follows upon a hundred years or more of a 
preparation which we in the western world 
have not fully understood. The village com- 
munity life of the Russian people has long given 
training, excellent, admirable training, in the 
affairs of government and domestic economy 
to thousands and tens of thousands of peasants 
with whom reading and writing are arts yet 
to be acquired. The Zemstvos, called into ex- 
istence fifty years ago, have grown in experi- 
ence and authority until as provincial assem- 
blies they have taken on some of the attributes 
of an American State legislature. During the 
past two and a half years they have been the 
most effective single instrument in equipping 
the Russian people to carry on the war, not 
only in a military but in an economic sense. 
There again, thousands and tens of thousands 
of peasants have been trained in habits of co- 
operation, in methods of government, in meth- 
ods of accomplishing public ends through pub- 
lic acts, all of which are strangely different 
from passing resolutions and issuing manifes- 



THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 215 

toes. And so when the time came and the 
domino could be thrown aside, it was not to 
a wholly untrained and unfamiliar people that 
this opportunity for self-government came. It 
was rather to a people already partially tutored 
in government and to one whose members had 
long, long been thinking hard about govern- 
ment. If that under which they lived was 
government, what could governments be for ? 
Can you wholly fail to understand the men 
who could only answer Mr. Kennan's category 
of crime by violence ? Among one hundred 
and seventy millions of people is it strange 
that there were some who could not wait ? Is 
it strange that there were some who could not 
control their passions and who, stirred to the 
deepest resentment by what they saw and felt 
and suffered, gave way, human-like, to those 
passions which could only aggravate although 
intended to cure ? It is not strange. There is 
a point beyond which human nature cannot 
resist temptation, and that point was reached, 
long ago reached, under the autocracy of 
Russia. 

Now, I repeat, the centre of gravity of the 
world's interest has changed. We follow with 



216 THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

the greatest anxiety the daily, almost the 
hourly, movement of those magnificent armies 
that are standing between the American people 
and their foes on the western front in Europe. 
But the future of the new Europe, perhaps the 
future of humanity, is being worked out to-day 
while we sit here, on the unfamiliar banks of 
the Neva, the Volga, and the Vistula. If Rus- 
sia holds firm, if her new-found political con- 
sciousness and her new-found political power 
stand the storms from within and without to 
which they certainly are exposed, the success- 
ful end of this war for liberty is in measurable 
sight. But if Russia gives way and if the 
whole of the eastern continent is open to those 
who hold other views and have other aims 
than ours, this war may last till every head in 
this hall is gray. On Russia, on free Russia, 
on democratic Russia, now depends the early 
and the successful issue of the war. 

Must we not then, men of letters, artists, 
citizens, hasten to the highest mountain-top 
and call out our greeting across land and sea 
to those who would stand with us for this 
common cause ? Should we not hasten to call 
out to them a word of encouragement and help 



THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 217 

and warning, and to say: "We understand what 
you have gone through; we know what the 
past has been. Stand firm, and help us to 
make a new future that will be a new future 
for the United States as well as a new future 
for Russia" ? 

Years ago, in a striking statement, Count 
MuraviefF said Russia was coming to bear upon 
her shoulders the new age. "We are coming," 
this is his phrase, "to relieve the tired men." 
The Latins have had their great era; the Anglo- 
Saxons have had their great era; the Teutons 
have had their great era; and now the Slav 
emerges into the full view of modern history 
and into participation with it to relieve the 
tired men. The Slav is going to come with all 
his unknown potentiality, with all his amazing 
differences from what have hitherto been the 
western peoples. The Slav is going to come, 
bound to the west by this new social and po- 
litical ideal and by this possession of new social 
and political power. 

Long ago, three quarters of a century ago, 
Gogol looking out on his land cried: "Whither 
art thou speeding, my Russia?" Now we 
think we have an answer to the question. 



218 THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

Whither art thou speeding, Russia ? Speeding 
toward the high places that are in possession of 
those human spirits who love liberty, who love 
justice, who preach and who practise righteous- 
ness, and who, with all their faults and stum- 
blings and imperfections, will labor for the 
coming of that happy day when this earth shall 
be a better place to live in because men are all 
free and just together. That is where we must 
hope that Gogol's Russia is speeding. 



XIV 
THE CALL TO SERVICE 



An Address delivered at the Service of Farewell to 
Columbia Students Leaving for the War, 
St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia Uni- 
versity, May, 6, 1917 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

In all the long and honorable history of our 
University, there has been no hour just like 
this. The world is at war, and this University, 
in common with the nation that it loves and 
serves, is about to send of its bravest and its 
best to take a share in a struggle on whose re- 
sult the history of mankind for centuries will 
hang. 

On the eve of that going out, we gather to 
participate in this stately and solemn service 
to Almighty God, in Whose name this Univer- 
sity was founded and in Whose name it has 
labored from generation to generation. 

This hour, these happenings, this service, 
bring us face to face with the everlasting 
values of life, and with a contemplation of 
those standards by which men measure con- 
duct and civilization and by which history 
awards them praise or blame. While we are 
here in quiet contemplation and prayer, on the 
other side of the Atlantic, at this very mo- 
ment, more than twenty million men in arms 

221 



222 THE CALL TO SERVICE 

are struggling to determine whether our nation 
and our University shall live. 

On the northern and eastern slopes of Vimy 
ridge, on the uplands of Craonne looking upon 
the historic fortress of Laon over territory 
which has been the scene of historic contest 
since the days of Julius Caesar, your fate and 
mine is being determined by men whom we 
have never seen and whose very names we do 
not know. And then, away over yonder be- 
yond the Vistula and the Masurian Lakes, on 
down across the Balkan peninsula to the very 
gates of the garden of Eden itself, participants 
in this struggle are face to face in arms. 

The call for liberty, for righteousness, for 
justice between men and nations, has filled the 
ears and stirred the hearts of our nation, and 
this University has responded in the only way 
that a university of its traditions and ruling 
principles could respond. Without boastful- 
ness, without vaunting, but with quiet and 
serene courage and determination, our every 
member will take his place as soldier or civilian 
in that great army of the people which is en- 
listed to bring this war to a speedy and final 
conclusion on such a basis that just peace may 



TEE CALL TO SERVICE 223 

reign in this world, and, in the fine phrase of 
the President, "the world may be made safe 
for democracy." 

Columbia gives all it has, and it is with in- 
finite pride and brotherly satisfaction that we 
look into the faces of this youth which has 
elected to enroll in the military service of the 
United States and to place its intelligence, its 
character, its training, at the service, not alone 
of its country, but of the great fundamental 
principles on which civilization rests. 

One of the oldest and subtlest philosophies 
in the world teaches that the whole of history 
consists in the struggle between the principle 
of good and the principle of evil. It teaches 
that now one, now the other, is uppermost, 
but that as the good principle overcomes the 
evil, or as the evil principle overcomes the good, 
so mankind marches forward to freedom or so 
it falls back into serfdom and slavery. 

This great struggle between the good and 
the evil principle has taken, in this twentieth 
century, the form of a contest between two 
political and social principles which cannot 
live together in this world. And that is why 
this contest must be settled by force of arms. 



224 THE CALL TO SERVICE 

If those two principles had anything in com- 
mon, an adjustment between them might pos- 
sibly be reached; but each principle absolutely 
excludes the other. As Abraham Lincoln said 
a generation ago, "This nation cannot exist 
half slave and half free," so it may be said 
to-day, "This world cannot exist half despot- 
ism and half democracy." 

Democracy must in its way dispose of des- 
potism or despotism will in its way overcome 
democracy. Therefore, it is to no ordinary 
contest that this nation goes forward. It is to 
no struggle as to which one may be for a mo- 
ment indifferent. It is to the deepest and most 
tremendous conflict that all history records, 
and Columbia answers, Adsum ! Columbia 
stretches forth her hand in preparation to aid 
those of her sons who are rushing forward to 
posts of honor and service and danger, and 
then extends her hand in blessing and benedic- 
tion upon them and their ideals and their 
efforts. 

Wherever the cause of liberty is in danger, 
there Columbia's hand will be found to help 
avert it. Wherever the rule of despotism is 
extending, there Columbia's hand will be found 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 225 

to remove it. Wherever there is need of sci- 
entific skill and genius to serve, to cure, to in- 
vent, to construct, there a Columbia hand will 
be found ready to do its duty for the advance- 
ment of the public good and for the glory of 
Almighty God. 



XV 
THE ENVOYS AT THE UNIVERSITY 



An Address delivered at a Special Convocation of 
Columbia University, May 10, 1917 



THE ENVOYS AT THE UNIVERSITY 

Since in 1861 Columbia University gave its 
highest honors to Abraham Lincoln, it has 
known no such day as this. In the modern 
democracies, the university — and the univer- 
sity almost alone — is able to rise above strife of 
party or of faction, above difference of religious 
creed, above official forms and material stand- 
ards, to speak for the spirit and the mind of 
the whole people. This University is especially 
competent so to speak because of its long and 
noble tradition, because of its unbroken record 
of distinguished public service, and because of 
the great army of men who from decade to 
decade, and now even from century to cen- 
tury, have gone out through its gates to serve 
the State and to play a man's part in the world. 

To-day this University speaks with no un- 
certain voice to offer a welcome, finely sym- 
bolized by the outstretched arms of Alma 
Mater, to those great men who, as captains of 
the public policies of democratic peoples, as 
captains of armies and of navies, and as cap- 
229 



230 ENVOYS AT THE UNIVERSITY 

tains of commerce and of finance, have repre- 
sented with consummate skill and supreme 
devotion the aspirations and the purposes of 
the French Republic and of the British Em- 
pire. It is in but a superficial sense that 
France, Great Britain, and the United States 
are allies in the conduct of war; in a far deeper 
sense they are companions in the great enter- 
prise of democracy, in the spreading of higher 
hope and broader opportunity among men, and 
in the upbuilding of a yet finer and fairer and 
more secure structure of civil and political lib- 
erty upon the foundations that the fathers have 
laid. The intellect and the conscience of Amer- 
ica, speaking so far as they may by this Uni- 
versity — the University of Alexander Hamil- 
ton, friend and companion-in-arms of La Fay- 
ette — cry Hail to these representatives of our 
brothers, and bid them know how complete and 
how whole-hearted are our country's under- 
standing of their aims and our country's appre- 
ciation of their accomplishments and their 
sacrifices. Behind the powerful defense of 
their armies and their navies we have for two 
and a half years rested secure and undisturbed. 
The time has fortunately come when the Ameri- 






ENVOYS AT THE UNIVERSITY 231 

can people have declared their purpose to add 
might to their sympathy and to put determina- 
tion behind their good will. To this epochal 
fact full testimony is borne by the city of New 
York, the great power-house of the nation's 
energies, in which is centred so much of Ameri- 
can activity and from which radiate so many 
of the directing forces in American life. 

There can be but one certain end to this 
war, and there can be but one road to durable 
peace. Were it possible to contemplate the 
present victory of those forces that would halt 
and imperil democracy, there would lie before 
us, before our children, and before our chil- 
dren's children, an unbroken series of wars, 
until those who come after us had gained what 
we in our day had failed to accomplish. The 
upward progress of mankind may be delayed 
or checked, but it cannot forever be prevented. 
In the whole course of history, no great crisis 
which involved the forward march of man has 
been resolved to his disadvantage. Democracy 
will win this war because the works of men will 
not fall below the full measure of their faith. 

To you, M. Viviani, representative of the 
government and the mind of France; to you, 



232 ENVOYS AT THE UNIVERSITY 

Marshal Joffre, whose name and fame already 
belong to the ages; to you, Lord Cunliffe, as a 
tower of national strength; and to you, Mr. 
Consul-General, representing the Right Hon- 
orable Arthur James Balfour, consummate 
flower of British cultivation and British states- 
manship — I bid sincere and affectionate wel- 
come to this University, which, as yonder 
legend reads, was "founded in the Province of 
New York by Royal Charter in the Reign of 
George II, perpetuated as Columbia College by 
the people of the State of New York when they 
became free and independent, maintained and 
cherished from generation to generation for the 
advancement of the public good and the glory 
of Almighty God." 



XVI 

THE INTERNATIONAL MIND: HOW TO 
DEVELOP IT 



Introductory Address delivered at the National Con- 
ference on Foreign Relations of the United States, 
held under the auspices of the Academy of 
Political Science, Long Beach, New 
York, May 28, 1917 



THE INTERNATIONAL MIND: HOW TO 
DEVELOP IT 

For two generations it has been a common 
complaint that the people of the United States 
took no adequate interest in foreign policy, and 
were without any but cursory knowledge of 
international politics. This judgment has been 
expressed, often publicly, by successive secre- 
taries of state, by those who have held impor- 
tant diplomatic posts, and by those who, in 
the Senate of the United States, have seen 
long service upon the Committee on Foreign 
Relations. A sort of national self-centredness 
together with a feeling of geographic and po- 
litical isolation have combined to bring about 
this unfortunate state of affairs. It has been 
unfortunate for two reasons: first, because it 
marked a serious break with our earlier national 
tradition; and second, because it has held back 
the people and the government of the United 
States from making the full measure of con- 
tribution of which they were capable, to the 
better and closer international organization of 
the world. 

235 



236 THE INTERNATIONAL MIND: 

One need have but slight acquaintance with 
the writings and speeches of the fathers and 
with the records of the early Congresses to 
know that, when the government of the United 
States was young, it was the eager ambition of 
those who most fully represented it to play a 
large part in the international life of the world, 
primarily with the view of advancing those 
ideas and those principles in which the people 
of the new American republic believed and to 
which they were committed. Benjamin Frank- 
lin was our first great internationalist. Alex- 
ander Hamilton, of whom Talleyrand said that 
he had divined Europe; Thomas Jefferson, 
whose public service in Europe was quite ex- 
ceptional; as well as Chancellor Livingston, 
John Jay, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John 
Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay not only knew 
western Europe, but were known by it. In 
making endeavor, therefore, to increase the 
interest of the American people in foreign rela- 
tionships and in international policy we are 
but asking them to return to one of the finest 
and soundest of national traditions. 

Our national self-absorption has held us 
back, too, from playing an adequate part in 



HOW TO DEVELOP IT 237 

the development of that international organi- 
zation which has long been under way and 
which the results of the present war will hasten 
and greatly advance. Despite these facts, and 
chiefly because of the high character and ability 
of those who represented the United States at 
the two Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, 
the American contributions to the deliberations 
and recommendations of those notable assem- 
blies were most important. Indeed, when the 
record of history comes to be made up, it may 
be that those contributions will be judged to 
mark the beginning of a new epoch in the 
world's history. 

The Conference which now assembles to con- 
sider and discuss the international relations 
and the international policies of the United 
States, is a beginning and only a beginning 
of a campaign of education and enlightenment 
which is to continue until there has been devel- 
oped among all parts and sections of our land 
what I ventured some years ago to describe as 
the "international mind.' ,1 The international 
mind is nothing else than that habit of think- 

1 Cf. "The International Mind." (New York: Charles Scrib- 
ner's Sons, 19 13.) 



238 THE INTERNATIONAL MIND: 

ing of foreign relations and business and that 
habit of dealing with them which regard the 
several nations of the civilized world as free 
and co-operating equals in aiding the progress 
of civilization, in developing commerce and in- 
dustry, and in spreading enlightenment and 
culture throughout the world. It would be as 
inconsistent with the international mind to at- 
tempt to steal some other nation's territory or 
to do that nation an unprovoked injury or 
damage, as it would be inconsistent with the 
principles of ordinary morality to attempt to 
steal some other individual's purse or to com- 
mit an unprovoked assault upon him. The 
international mind requires that a nation and 
its government shall freely and gladly grant to 
every other nation and to every other govern- 
ment the rights and the privileges which it 
claims for itself. From this it follows that the 
international mind is not consonant with any 
theory of the State which regards the State as 
superior to the rules and restrictions of moral 
conduct or which admits the view that to some 
one State is committed the hegemony of the 
world's affairs for the world's good. When that 
doctrine prevails and takes hold of the convic- 



HOW TO DEVELOP IT 239 

tion and the imagination of a great people, an 
issue is presented that cannot be settled by 
vote in conference, that cannot be arbitrated 
by the wisest statesmen, and that cannot be 
determined by the findings of any court. The 
authority and the value of each of these modes 
of procedure is challenged by the very issue 
itself. Therefore resort must be had to armed 
force in order to determine whether the inter- 
national mind, shared by a score or more of 
independent and self-respecting nations, shall 
prevail, or whether the arms of a non-moral, 
all-powerful, military imperialism shall be 
stretched out over the whole round world for 
its government and its protection. It is to 
determine this issue that the world is now at 
war. 

Should the cause of imperialism, by any 
chance, win this war, the people of the United 
States would find it quite unnecessary for some 
time to come to concern themselves with for- 
eign relations and with foreign policy. Those 
matters would be taken care of for them by a 
power that had shown itself strong enough to 
overcome and to suppress the internationally 
minded men and nations. On the other hand, 



240 THE INTERNATIONAL MIND: 

if, as we confidently hope and believe, the issue 
of this war is to be favorable to the free, self- 
governing democracies of the world, then the 
people of the United States must address them- 
selves with redoubled energy and with closest 
attention to those matters of legislation, of 
administration, and of general public policy 
which constitute and determine national con- 
duct. The first task of this Conference and of 
every similar conference that may be held here- 
after is to drive this lesson home. 

When this task is undertaken it will speedily 
appear that our government is not well or- 
ganized at the moment for the formulation and 
prosecution of effective international policies. 
The division of authority between the national 
government and governments of the several 
States raises one kind of problem. Action un- 
der the treaty-making power of the national 
government raises another set of problems, par- 
ticularly since there is not yet a substantial 
unanimity of opinion as to the scope and au- 
thority of the treaty-making power itself, or 
as to the proper and effective means which 
should be at the command of the government 
of the United States for enforcing among its 



HOW TO DEVELOP IT 241 

own people adherence to a treaty obligation 
into which, through their government, they 
have solemnly entered. The difficulties with 
which we shall have to contend are, therefore, 
not alone difficulties arising from present lack 
of popular information and present lack of 
popular interest in international policies, but 
they are also those which arise from the struc- 
ture and the operation of our own form of 
constitutional government. 

That the old secrecy of diplomatic action has 
gone forever is a happy circumstance. This 
secrecy was well suited to the making of con- 
ventions between ruling monarchs or reigning 
dynasties, or between governments which rep- 
resented only very select and highly privileged 
classes. It has no place, however, in diplomatic 
intercourse between democratic peoples. The 
people themselves must understand and assent 
to international policies and contracts that are 
entered upon and executed in their name. 
Otherwise there can be no assurance that these 
policies will be executed and these contracts 
observed; for without foreknowledge on the 
part of the people of that to which they are 
committed there can be no successful moral 



242 THE INTERNATIONAL MIND 

appeal made to them to keep their word and 
their bond at a later time when an opposition 
may arise between principle and immediate 
self-interest. 

We are assembled, then, to help begin a 
movement which must not cease until the en- 
tire American people are interested in their 
international relationships, their international 
position, and their international influence. 
When that shall have been even measurably 
accomplished, the people themselves will be 
quick to bring about such changes in the form 
of their governmental structure and in their 
administrative procedure as will enable them 
honorably and finely to maintain their place, 
not as a nation that lives to itself alone, but as 
a nation that shares with every other like- 
minded nation the desire and the purpose to 
improve the lot of mankind everywhere, and 
to carry into the uttermost parts of the earth 
those hopes, those principles, and those forms 
of governmental action that are best adapted 
to giving man the fullest opportunity to make 
himself free, and to be worthy of freedom. 



XVII 
A WORLD IN FERMENT 



An Address delivered at the 163 d Commencement of 
Columbia University, June 6, 1917 



A WORLD IN FERMENT 

The hundreds, indeed the thousands, of 
American youth who pass out from this Uni- 
versity to-day go into a new and a strange 
world. It is more than a world at war; it is a 
world in ferment. From the steppes of Russia 
all the way across Europe and America and 
around to Japan and China, men and nations 
are not only engaged in a titanic military strug- 
gle but they are also examining and, when 
necessary, quickly readjusting and reorganiz- 
ing their customary habits of thought and of 
action, private as well as public. It is not 
easy, perhaps it is impossible, to find an Ari- 
adne who will give us a guiding thread through 
this labyrinth of change. Presuppositions that 
have long sustained the solid fabric of personal 
and of national conduct have been destroyed. 
Assumptions that have seemed to be made 
certain by the earlier progress of man have 
disappeared under the pressure of the latest 
manifestations of trained human capacity for 
evil. 

245 



246 A WORLD IN FERMENT 

Before such a scene the timid will despair, 
while the reckless will affect an indifference that 
they cannot really feel. The wise will follow a 
different course. They will not be hurried into 
judging of normal man on the basis of his latest 
abnormalities, and they will not permit them- 
selves to forget all that human history teaches 
because the happenings of the moment seem 
to teach something quite different. The wise 
will not lose their sense of proportion in judg- 
ing of events in time, in space, or in circum- 
stance. 

Each individual whose training has really 
reached the depths of his nature and so has 
formed his habits of thought and of action, 
will first examine his own relation to what is 
going on in the world, and will next inquire 
how that which is going on is to be judged in 
terms of everlasting standards of right and of 
wrong, of progress and of decline. He will first 
of all find himself to be a member of a politi- 
cally organized group which is a nation. He 
will find himself beholden to that group, to its 
traditions, to its ideals, and to its highest in- 
terests, not as a parasite but as a strengthen- 
ing and a contributing force. Recognition of 



A WORLD IN FERMENT 247 

this relationship will be the basis of his loyalty, 
and the measure of his loyalty will be not lip- 
service but sacrifice. He will in this way dis- 
cover that the ends of which his group or na- 
tion is in search are the ends that he must 
strive to accomplish. It will not be difficult 
for him to see that in most cases, in the vast 
majority of cases, these ends are to be reached 
by persuasion, by argument, by consent, but 
that in the last resort if they be ends on which 
turns the whole future of mankind they must, 
if need be, find protection and defense in physi- 
cal and military force. This is a sad but sig- 
nificant evidence of the incomplete develop- 
ment of mankind. 

He will next apply the standards of moral 
excellence and approval to the present-day 
conduct of men and of nations, with a view to 
determining whether the changes that are going 
forward are making for human progress or for 
human decline. He will be led to answer this 
question by the relative importance accorded 
to ideas and ideals. If men and nations are 
engaged in a blind struggle for material gain, 
for mere conquest, for revenge, or for future 
privileges, then what is going on is in high de- 



248 A WORLD IN FERMENT 

gree a manifestation of bestiality in man. If, 
on the other hand, the struggle be one for the 
establishment on the largest possible scale, in 
the securest possible way, of those institutions 
and opportunities which make man free, then 
the contest rises to the sublime. In this latter 
case every contestant on behalf of such a cause 
is a hero, and every one who offers his life and 
his strength and his substance is a sincere lover 
of his kind. 

It may therefore well be that it is for the 
issue of this war to determine whether man- 
kind is still in progress or has begun his decline. 
If the moral, the economic, and the physical 
power of men and of nations that love freedom 
is adequate to its establishment on a secure 
basis, then mankind is still in progress and new 
vistas of satisfaction and of accomplishment 
are to be spread out before him. If, on the 
other hand, the strength of men and of nations 
that love freedom is not adequate to this 
severe task, then man has crossed the Great 
Divide of his political history and is to begin 
a descent into those dark places where force 
and cruelty and despotism wreak their will. 
Nothing less than this is the alternative which 



A WORLD IN FERMENT 249 

now confronts not alone the nations of the 
earth, but every individual in each one of 
those nations. The responsibility for action 
and for service cannot be devolved upon some 
one else, least of all can it be devolved upon 
government officials and government agencies. 
These have their great part to play, but in 
last resort the issue will be decided, not by 
governments, not even by armies and by na- 
vies, but by men and women who are the sup- 
port of all these and whose convictions and 
stern action are the foundation upon which 
government and armies and navies rest. 

Let there be no faltering by any son or 
daughter of Columbia. The clock of time is 
about to strike the most portentous hour in 
all history. May each child of this ancient 
University take inspiration and courage from 
Alma Mater herself, who in her long life has 
in time of trouble never wavered, in time of 
danger never hesitated, in time of difficulty 
never doubted. May all her children be for- 
ever worthy of her! 



INDEX 



Adams, John Quincy, ioo, 236 

Administration, improvement of 
public, 168 

Admiralty, the, 182 

Africa, 91, 141; South, 99 

Alaska, 157 

Alexander the Great, 136 

American development, three peri- 
ods in, 104; international 
policy, difficulties of, 156, 240; 
isolation, end of, 92, 189; Prot- 
estant College, 64; republics, 
South, 61, 62, 63, 180; Revolu- 
tion, 210 

Arbitral Justice, Court of, 194 

Arbitration, Court of, 193 

Argentina, 62 

Armaments and peace, 18 

Asia, 91, 136, 141, 176 

Asquith, Herbert H., 57 

Australia, 91 

Austria-Hungary, 17, 32, 54,140, 
197 

Balfour, Arthur James, 232 

Balkan peninsula, the, 222 

Baltimore, 91 

Beaconsfield, Lord, 33 

Beirut, 64 

Belgium, 4, 147, 174, 177 

Berkeley, Bishop, 70 

Berlin, 193 

Bismarck, 33, 38 

Bosporus, 64 

Brazil, 62 

British Empire, 230; Navy, 177, 

186 
Brussels, 198 
Bryce, Viscount, 97 
Buenos Aires, 15 
Bulgaria, 64 
Biilow, Prince von, 193 

Caesar, Julius, 222 
Calgacus, 8 
California, 140, 157 



Caribbean, 120 

Carson, Sir Edward, 182 

Case, Newfoundland Fisheries, 

195; Pious Fund, 194 
Caucasus, 55 
Central Powers, 184 
Chamberlain, Joseph, 99 
Charlemagne, 118, 136 
Chili, 62 
China, 60, 245 
Choate, Joseph H., 96 
Civil War, 103, 109 
Clay, Henry, 190, 236 
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 23 
College, American Protestant, 64; 

Columbia, 145, 232; King's, 

145; Robert, 64 
Colorado, 59, 157 
Columbia College, 145, 232; 

University, 146, 149, 150, 223, 

224, 225, 229, 249 
Commission, Tariff, 96; Trade, 96 
Committee on Foreign Relations, 

23s 
Commons, House of, 182 
Concord Bridge, 145 
Concorde, Place de la, 208 
Congress of the United States, 

35. 44. 146, 156, i57f 186 
Connecticut, 59 
Constantinople, 64 
Constitution of the United States, 

the, 109, no, 122, 138, 159, 160, 

177, 188 
Court of Arbitration, 193; of 

Arbitral Justice, 194; of the 

United States, Supreme, 36, 

58, 19s, iQ7 
Craonne, 222 
Cuba, 44, 59, 60, 62 
Cunliffe, Lord, 232 

Declaration of Independence, the, 

no, 138, 142, 178, 188 
Democracy and international 

peace, 52 



251 



252 



INDEX 



Detroit, 65 

Discipline and liberty, 212 

Disintegrating forces in American 

life, 123 
Douglas, Senator, 129 
Durable peace, the road to, 231 

Economic group, interests of an — 
versus national sovereignty, 161 

Economic production, the human 
element in, 162 

Eden, 222 

Empire, British, 230; Roman, 

90, 135, 175 

England, 41, 42, 70, 183, 195, 212 

Europe, 14, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 28, 

30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 

42, 43, 45, 54, 57, 58, 65, 70, 00, 

91, 94, 95, 107, 108, 121, 124, 
135, 137, 138, 141, 154, 155, 
156, 165, 167, 176, 178, 187, 
188, 190, 194, 216, 236, 245 

"Federalist, The," 159 
Federation and internationalism, 

30, 140 
Florida, 140, 157 
Ford, Henry, 65 
Fort Sumter, 145, 173 
France, 4, 6, 15, 22, 54, 121, 139, 

140, 177, 193, 197, 200, 212, 230 
Franco-Prussian War, the, 17, 34 
Franklin, Benjamin, 190, 236 
Frederick the Great, 15 
French Republic, the, 156, 230; 

Revolution, the, 133, 210 

Gambetta, 100 

Geneva Arbitration, 34 

George II, 15, 232 

German Emperor, the, 118, 193, 

194 
Germany, 17, 22, 32, 54, 139, 193 
Gettysburg, 177; Address, 138, 

189 
Gogol, 217, 218 
Government and liberty, 78 
Great Britain, 6, 54, 99, 121, 139, 

140, 193, 195, 197, 200, 230 
Guatemala, 134 
Gulflight, 50 



Hague Conferences, the, 192, 196, 
i97, 237; Conferences and the 
United States, the, 192; Con- 
ventions, the, 4, 55 ; the, 35, 
192, 194 

Hamilton, Alexander, 109, 129, 
142, 145, 230, 236 

Harrison, President, 158 

Hay, John, 39 

Holland, 121, 139 

Holls, Frederick W., 193, 194 

Home and nation, 80 

Honduras, 134 

House of Cpmmons, 182 

Human element in economic pro- 
duction, the, 162 

Idaho, 157 

Independence, the Declaration of, 

no, 138, 142, 178, 188 
Industrial and social organization, 

effect of the war on, 153, 200; 

peace and international peace, 

65 
Industry, better organization of, 

Institution building and time, 

211 
International mind, the, 43, 237; 

order, proposals for an, 55; 

peace and industrial peace, 65; 

policy, difficulties of American, 

156, 240 
Internationalism, colloidal and 

crystalline, 7; and federation, 

30, 140 
Iran, 127 
Isolation, the end of American, 92, 

189 
Italy, 139, 140, 183, 185, 197 

Japan, 60, 180, 197, 245 

Jaures, 22 

Jay, John, 145, 236 

Jefferson, Thomas, 109, 129, 142, 

190, 236 
Joffre, Marshal, 232 
Julius Caesar, 222 

Kennan, George, 207, 208, 215 
King's College, 145 
Kossuth, 190 



INDEX 



253 



La Fayette, 190, 230 

La Follette Shipping Bill, 157 

Laon, 222 

Learning, the Revival of, 175 

Liberty and discipline, 212; and 
government, 78 

Lincoln, Abraham, 75, 76, 103, 109, 
no, 114, 129, 142, 145, 190, 223, 
229; Second Inaugural Ad- 
dress of, 75, 76, 138 

Liverpool, 35 

Livingston, Chancellor, 145. i9°> 
236 

Louis XV, 15 

Louisiana, 157 

Lowell, 14, 149 

Lusitania, 50, 174 

McKinley, President, 158 
Magnitude of the war, the, 90, 

134, 175 
Maine, 140 
Manchuria, 60 
Marathon, 176 
Marshall, John, 109, 122, 142 
Massachusetts Bay, 121 
Masurian Lakes, the, 222 
Mayflower, the, 138 
Mazzini, 189 
Mediterranean, 64, 65 
Meredith, George, 117 
Mexico, 60, 61, 62, 194; policy of 

the United States toward, 62 
Militarism, 21, 39 
Mississippi, 157 
Monroe Doctrine, the, 63, 95 
Montana, 157 
Muravieff, Count, 217 

Nagasaki, 35 

Napoleon, 91, 136 

Nation and home, 80; building, 
118; defined, 40; the soul of 
the, 180 

National organization, better, 96; 
preparation for national ser- 
vice, 165; sovereignty versus 
the interests of an economic 
group, 161 

Neva, 216 



New England, 31,64; Orleans, 91; 

York, 15, 31, 35, 9*, I93> 230, 

232 
Newfoundland Fisheries Case, 195 
Niagara, 88 
North Sea, 55 

Oregon, 157 

Organization, better national, 96; 
of industry, better, 163 

Palmerston, 3s 

Panama Canal Tolls, 44 

Paris, 184 

Parliament, 35 

Patriotism a modern growth, 69 

Peace, 8; and armaments, 18; 
and democracy, international, 
52; road to a durable, 231 

Pennsylvania, 31 

Pericles, 93 

Periods in American develop- 
ment, three, 104 

Peru, 62 

Philippines, the, 44 

Pilgrim Fathers, the, 138, 236 

Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth, 
236 

Pious Fund Case, 194 

Place de la Concorde, 208 

Piatt Amendment, 59; Senator 
O. H., 59 

Poland, 4 

Postal Conventions, the, 35 

Preparation for national service, 
national, 165 

Preparedness, the object of, 109 

President of the United States, 
the, 15, 60, 76, 105, 146, 147, 
148, 169, 186, 194, 196, 223 

Proposals for an international 
order, 55 

Prussia, 15 

Public administration, improve- 
ment of, 168 

Puget Sound, 91 

Railways of the United States, 

needs of, 160 
Reichstag, 35 
Rhode Island, 31 



254 



INDEX 



Roman Empire, go, 135, 175 

Rome, 40, 41 

Roosevelt, President, 158, 194, 
196 

Root, Elihu, 59, 195, 196 

Roumania, 4 

Rousseau, influence of Jean Jac- 
ques, 210 

Russia, 17, 54, 60, 140, 184, 197, 
212, 216, 218, 245; responsi- 
bility of, 184 

Russian revolution, the, 210, 213 

Russo-Japanese War, 60 

Secretary of State, the, 60 
Senate of the United States, the, 

105, 235 
Serbia, 4, 54, 77 
Service, national preparation for 

national, 165 
Soul of the nation, the, 180 
South American republics, the, 

61, 62, 63, 180 
Spain, 180 
Spanish War, 44, 59 
Sparta, 94 
State Department, the, 105; the 

Secretary of, 60 
Steel Corporation, the United 

States, 65 
Stubbs, 99 

Sumter, Fort, 145, 173 
Supreme Court of the United 

States, the, 36, 58, 195, 197 
Syria, 64 

Tacitus, 8 
Taft, President, 158 
Talleyrand, 236 
Tariff Commission, 96 
Teller, Senator Henry M., 59 
Texas, 157 

Thinking internationally, 99, in 
Three periods of American de- 
velopment, 104 
Time and institution building, 211 
Tolstoy, 213, 214 
Trade Commission, 96 
Tsar, the, 196, 211, 213 



United States, the Congress of the, 
35, 44, 146, _ 156, 157, 186; 
the Constitution of the, 109, 
no, 122, 138, 159, 160, 177, 188; 
of Europe, the, 27, 31, 32; the 
Government of the, 3, 4, 58, 
157, 168, 235, 236, 240; and 
the Hague Conferences, the, 
192; needs of the railways of 
the, 160; the people of the, 3, 4, 
27, 54, 61, 99, 100, 168, 169, 
190, 235, 239, 240; policy of 
the, toward Mexico, 62; the 
President of the, 15, 60, 76, 105, 
146, 147, 148, 169, 186, 194, 
196, 223; Secretary of State 
of the, 60; Senate of the, 105, 
235; Steel Corporation, 65; 
Supreme Court of the, 36, 58, 
195, 197 

Uruquay, 62 

Vimy ridge, 222 
Virginia, 121 
Vistula, 208, 216 
Viviani, M. Ren6, 231 
Volga, 216 

Wall Street, 91 

Walpole, Horace, 70 

War a true world war, the, 147; 

effect of the, on industrial and 

social organization, 153, 200; 

the Franco-Prussian, 17, 34; 

magnitude of the, 90, 134, 175; 

the Russo-Japanese, 60; the 

Spanish, 44, 59 
Washington, D. C, 169, 170; 

Farewell Address of, 75, 76 no; 

George, 98, 107, 129, 138, 142, 

187, 190; State of, 140, 157. 
Webster, Daniel, 109, 122, 142 
White, Andrew D., 193, 194 
Whitehall, 208 
World power, old and new, 49 

Yellow Sea, 208 
Yokohama, 35 

Zemstvos, 214 



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